A breakthrough in domestic chips: the first 300mm RF-SOI wafer of the Chinese Academy of Sciences was successful.
As we all know, the current chip is based on silicon, that is, silicon is used as a raw material, manufactured on a silicon wafer, and then cut and packaged on a bare die through photolithography, etching and other technologies.
It can be said that silicon wafers are the most important material, but there are also many types of silicon wafers, and not all chips use the same silicon wafers.
For example, some time ago, the Shanghai Institute of Microsystems, Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that the research team prepared China's first 300mm radio frequency (RF) SOI silicon wafer, achieving 01 inch breakout.
SOI is an abbreviation for SiliconOnInsulator, which is a silicon transistor structure on an insulating medium.
The advantage of SOI silicon wafers is that it can reduce the leakage current, thereby reducing the power consumption, because the leakage power consumption of the silicon wafer accounts for half of the total power consumption, and reducing the leakage current can greatly reduce the power consumption and reduce the heat generation.
There are also SOI wafers, which can increase the clock frequency, so this kind of wafer is generally suitable for low-power, low-heat, low-power, heat-sensitive devices, such as RF devices, power devices and silicon photonics devices.
Previously, the domestic market did not have the ability to manufacture such SOI wafers, and more than 90% of the global SOI wafer market was monopolized by the French company SOITEC. In the manufacture of SOI wafers, the United States is the core and the best, and many RF chips, major foundries, and even the United States, most of the RF device foundries, are the core of the United States.
Naturally, with the continuous subdivision of the process, SOI wafers are also divided into various types, such as FD-SOI, RF-SOI, Power-SOI, PHOTONICS-SOI, IMAGER-SOI, etc.
These wafers are used in different wafers and different fields, and this time the Chinese Academy of Sciences only produced RF-SOI wafers, but I believe that in the next follow-up work, we will be able to produce more SOI wafers.
In addition, with the production of domestic SOI wafers, it will also promote the localization of SOI wafer foundry, etc., you must know that the current development of domestic first-frequency chips is relatively backward, such as the radio frequency chips used in mobile phones, especially high-end radio frequency chips such as 5G radio frequency chips, most of which cannot be manufactured in China rely heavily on imports.
I think the introduction of RF-SOI wafers will also promote the development of supporting industries such as RF chip foundry and packaging, thereby reducing the subsequent dependence of RF chips on foreign countries.