Chapter 1159
The First Domestically Produced Chip! From 0 to 1
The lingering resentment in her heart, a resentment she herself hadn't dared to admit, vanished instantly, transforming into a rush of hot, clear water that flowed through her entire body! Joy exploded undisguised in her eyes, which seemed to be filled with stars once again.
But she quickly realized that this guy had so directly exposed her little scheme!
"Who...who wants to be locked up...who's worried about you..." She blushed instantly, and angrily slapped away Su Dingping's hand that was still pinching her cheek. She quickly turned around, as if to check the machine's heat dissipation vent, leaving Su Dingping with a fair nape stained with a deep red and a ponytail that kept swaying slightly.
But that lighthearted and cheerful feeling that belonged to a young girl instantly filled this cold space enveloped by heavy technological pressure.
With the underlying structure and operating logic reference provided by the TRATLAS-2000 "skeleton", the Loongson Lab was like a shot in the arm!
Su Dingping led his team to completely abandon the idea of "restoring cultural relics".
The antique was disassembled into pieces, retaining only its core optical imaging principle reference and control timing logic, among other "genes".
All replaceable parts—laser, worktable, focusing lens group, temperature control system, data transmission interface…—were redesigned and remanufactured using the best materials available to Longxia! The base was made of Kunlun jade, and the carrier was made of "Etching Shadow" adhesive.
The key technologies of the immersion water film component of the "Shadow Erosion Project" were painstakingly grafted and modified!
They poured their hearts and souls into it! They worked tirelessly day and night!
Two months and seven days after Qin Mingzhu delivered that "scrap metal," in the dead of night, the first fully independently integrated and assembled DUV immersion lithography prototype machine of Loongson Lab, codenamed "Fuxi-1," slowly started up amidst a huge hum and the almost suffocating gazes of everyone!
An extremely pure "Kunlun Jade" disc is evenly coated with the latest iteration of "Etching-7B" photoresist.
It was carefully placed on a modified, high-precision stage. The laser lit up, and water flowed between the objective lens and the wafer, forming a stable liquid interface refractive layer! The pattern on the mask was projected, reduced, and focused!
This marks the first time that Longxia's brand-new lithography machine has been truly put into "trial production"!
Photolithography…exposure complete! Development! Etching! Ion implantation! Annealing…
When the first integrated chip produced by the Loongson Lab using its own lithography equipment was placed on the test bench, the screen lit up! The basic logic gate signals were normal! Although the transistor parameters were extremely unstable and crude, and even the benchmark scores were inferior to a common 250nm commercial processor produced decades ago, the results were still impressive!
“Report! Clock speed… 0.65GHz! Power consumption… far exceeding the standard! Structure… barely equivalent to 180-200nm process level…” Yuan Tao’s voice was hoarse as he looked at the appalling performance parameters flashing on the screen.
The entire laboratory fell into a deathly silence once again.
There were no cheers. There was no excitement.
There's only the chilling reality of finally pushing open a door, only to find a steep cliff behind it. The ultimate 250nm? Even with top-tier silicon wafers and photoresist, the first "indigenous" lithography machine didn't even reach the modern 250nm threshold! It's practically an antique process!
Is 250nm enough?
Su Dingping's voice suddenly rang out in the silence, cold and hard as ore.
Not enough! Far from enough!
This is just the beginning! Not the end! We're not creating electronic waste that's decades behind! We need the core technology to power electromagnetic railguns for ultra-long-range precision guidance!
We need computing modules capable of supporting the stable operation of the Aurogon at its maximum output! We need the foundational information superhighway to connect the Nantianmen Project! What we need—is 7nm!
He stepped onto the steps in front of the control panel, his gaze sweeping over everyone like a burning spark.
"From today onwards, our goal is to push Fuxi-1 to its limits! Our goal is 7nm!"
The goal is 7nm! The slogan is grand and inspiring, but the reality is a bloody and brutal climb!
The crude design and components of the "Fuxi-1" satellite were like heavy shackles dragging its feet. Attempts to improve accuracy? Insufficient power and poor stability of the core light source! Difficulty in correcting aberrations in the lens optical path system!
The unstable flow rate control in the immersion water film system easily generates bubbles, causing exposure defects! The stage movement accuracy can only barely meet the requirements of the 180nm process!
Optimization and tuning attempts failed time and time again!
Batch after batch of expensive "Kunlun Jade" silicon wafers have been turned into charred remains in the waste heap!
Bottles of the rare "Etching Shadow" glue were wasted in vain!
Time flies by like water!
The countdown to the construction of the "Candle Dragon" reactor hangs like a death knell overhead!
Anxiety! Despair! A sense of helplessness permeated the laboratory like a gigantic, shadowy monster. If things continued like this, forget 7nm, even stable mass production of 200nm might be a distant dream! Time was being dragged out!
It was another late night. The conference room was filled with smoke, and everyone's eyes were sunken.
Yuan Tao, a key technical staff member whose hair had thinned from staying up too late, stubbed out his virtual cigarette hard and stood up with bloodshot eyes.
"President Su! Conventional optimization is no longer feasible! There's simply no time to spare! We... must take a risk! Use multiple exposures! Use unconventional process paths to achieve higher precision!"
The entire room was filled with astonishment!
"Multiple exposures?!"
Old Li's white eyebrows instantly furrowed into a knot.
"Theoretically, it's feasible! But that requires extremely precise micro-manipulation on perfect equipment! Our current Fuxi-1... it even wobbles when it moves in a straight line! Using it for stacking exposures? With so many layers, any tiny misalignment during overlay will be amplified layer by layer! The accumulated errors will be a disaster! The yield... will be appalling!"
"We don't have time to polish the equipment!"
Yuan Tao's voice was hoarse, carrying a resolute determination.
"Let's use the brute force method! Stack up the layers!"
If a single alignment error can exceed 15nm, then we'll sacrifice a larger area and use more complex five- or even six-layer exposures! We'll use design redundancy to thicken and widen the circuitry! We'll forcefully reduce the average overlay error!
"By leveraging process complexity to approach the physical linewidth of 7nm! Mr. Su, this is currently the only path we can possibly achieve! I know the risks are high! I know the failure rate is over 90%! But it's still better than waiting to die here!"
All eyes were fixed on the silent Su Dingping. The air in the conference room felt thick and heavy.
Su Dingping looked at the 7nm test chip structure diagram on the projection screen, which was marked as a five-layer photolithography mask, with lines stacked like a tangled mess and a bloated structure like a patchwork.
That image is like a monster created by a desperate person in a panic! Ugly! Inefficient! It defies the conventional aesthetics of simplicity and efficiency!
But he knew even more that Yuan Tao wasn't wrong. There was no time left!
"Dry!"
Su Dingping slammed his hand on the table, the alloy surface groaning loudly, making the pixels in the virtual ashtray jump.
His voice was resolute.
"Immediately assemble a stacking imaging task force! Yuan Tao will serve as the on-site technical director! Implement the five-layer exposure scheme! Even if the success rate is only one in ten thousand! As long as there is even a sliver of a possibility to create transistors that meet the feature size requirements of the 7nm node!"
"Go down this path! Failure? Scrap metal? Money wasted? It's all on me! I'll take full responsibility for all the consequences! There's only one goal—to clear this bloody path! To build the core for the Candle Dragon! To send it a beating heart!" In the days that followed, the Loongson Lab entered a brutal, self-destructive meat grinder mode.
Each five-layer exposure is a hellish test of equipment stability, process precision, and the limits of engineers' nerves!
Apply glue...align...expose!
Change the mask again... apply the base anti-reflective coating again... align again... expose again!
Repeat this process five times!
An almost frenzied atmosphere permeated the laboratory. The operators' eyes were practically glued to the alignment instrument's window, holding their breath with every minor adjustment, their palms drenched in cold sweat.
The air was thick with the smells of photoresist solvents, developer, and the sweat of excessive tension. The machine alarms blared like a death knell, almost without ceasing.
After the first batch of five-layer overlay engraving trial production, Guo Xueyun held the newly released yield report, her fingers trembling slightly.
She walked up to Su Dingping, who hadn't slept all night and whose eyes were sunken, her voice trembling with tears.
"Mr. Su...Mr. Su..."
The number highlighted in bold red on the report was alarming.
[Yield Rate: 14.7%]
What is the baseline yield for manufacturing 7nm chips using advanced international EUV lithography machines? Initially, it exceeds 70%! After mass production stabilizes, it even reaches 95%!
Loongson's five-layer overlay process achieves 14.7%!
This means that out of every 100 chips produced, fewer than 15 are usable! And of those, only one in 100 meets the design performance requirements! The remaining 85.3% are all scrap! All that wasted money! And there are immeasurable R&D resources and time invested!
Expensive "Kunlun Jade" silicon wafers?
Rare and optimized "Etching-7B" photoresist?
Exorbitantly priced special etching agents?
Like flowing water, it is consumed into that roaring, seemingly insatiable machine, and then turns into piles of electronic waste that can only be processed by a shredder!
At the entrance of the laboratory, an accountant sent by the finance department was constantly holding a cost accounting sheet and pounding his chest in frustration.
"Loss! Huge loss!! President Su! You do the math! The cost of producing each qualified chip is ten times the market purchase price!"
Twenty times! And that doesn't even include losses!! We...we're practically committing a suicidal attack with mountains of money on the line!
The production area of "Fuxi-1" under the five-layer exposure process is like a black hole with its jaws wide open, ruthlessly devouring every precious resource and every remaining shred of confidence in this not yet fully mature laboratory.
Longxia Chip's journey toward self-reliance, after just seeing a glimmer of hope, has once again plunged into an abyss called "multiple exposure hell," struggling on the brink of suffocation from losses and fruitless efforts!
"Money is burning!"
Old Wang's tearful accusations were like knives etched onto the cold metal walls of the laboratory, and also pierced the hearts of everyone present.
The exposed meat grinder production line, while frantically chewing on "Kunlun Jade" and "Etching Shadow" glue, is also gradually turning the precious time of the Loongson Laboratory and the confidence of the entire Longxia tribe with national support into dust!
Night after night, Su Dingping stood like a numb boulder beside the massive, roaring "Fuxi-14" supercomputer that churned up expensive junk. The scarlet "7%" yield rate on the screen was like a Damocles' sword hanging over his head. The cold control panel reflected his sunken eye sockets and almost burning pupils.
“It’s blocked…” His hoarse voice, like sandpaper scraping, was unusually clear in the silent laboratory at night.
"28nm is the limit! The yield rate of this 7nm monster, which is built up like a zombie, is lower than the chance of finding a gold bar on the street! If we keep building it like this, even if we empty the treasury of Longxia, we still won't be able to feed this monster! Let alone make the heart of the Candle Dragon!"
He slammed his fist on the edge of the control panel, and the alloy made a dull "clang" sound!
"There is only one way out! We must build the West's ultimate chain—the EUV lithography machine! Not by buying, not by stealing, but by honestly and honorably building it from our own land! We must build our own truly 13.5nm extreme ultraviolet light! We must build the precision heart that can control that destructive light source!"
His voice suddenly rose, carrying an undeniable determination and an almost ferocious aura.
"Abandon illusions! Halt all five-layer superimposition experiments! Reserve Fuxi-13 as a redundant backup for later basic lithography steps! From this moment on—Project Chasing Light is launched! There is only one goal! EUV! Create 5nm light for me!"
The order swept through the lifeless, anxious, and desperate laboratory like a hurricane. After the initial shock came an overwhelming sense of pessimism and disbelief!
“E… EUV? Mr. Su!”
Yuan Tao's voice changed as if he had been stepped on. He pointed to "Fuxi-1"—the lithography machine that had been painstakingly pieced together but could only perform 200nm-level ancient processes and whose parts were groaning in pain when it was running.
"We haven't even figured out DUV yet! EUV?!"
This is like sending a toddler who's just learned to walk to participate in a speed climbing competition to the summit of Mount Everest! And they're going to break the world record!
That's not even in the same dimension!
"President Su, that light source alone could be fatal!"
The engineer in charge of the preliminary research on the light source had a long face.
"13.5nm extreme ultraviolet!"
This thing can't be generated by focusing with a regular lens at all!
It requires ultra-high power drive! It needs precise control of tens of thousands of tin microdroplet ejections per second! Then it needs to be bombarded with laser pulses! This causes the tin ions to generate plasma that emits light of a specific wavelength… Any one of these steps is hellishly difficult! The highest power lasers we have can't even reach that point!
The laboratory was deathly silent.
Everyone knows that EUV represents the most brilliant and also the most distant star in the crown of human industry.
Its manufacturing difficulty was comparable to ascending to the heavens in a purgatory! The Eagle Tribe mobilized the nation's top enterprises, amassed mountains of funds, and assembled an unimaginable team of genius engineers, spending a full twenty years to barely manage to complete it! The Loongson Lab? That's all they had at their disposal! And that was under complete blockade! (End of Chapter)