The Challenge Of 1 Nanometer Chip Can Not Be Separated From The Application Of Tungsten!

With its excellent mechanical, thermal and electrical properties, tungsten has become an indispensable raw material for many modern industries, such as tungsten-copper alloy for the throat lining of large rockets, and tungsten-molybdenum products for many parts of small chips, such as diffusion barrier, bonding layer, electronic packaging materials, transistors, etc.

The chip is a semiconductor component produced after many complex design processes of integrated circuits, which consists of a large number of transistors and is widely used in TVs, computers, stereos, electronic organs, video players, VCRs, cell phones, remote controls, cameras, alarms and other devices.

At present, the mainstream semiconductor process progresses to the 5nm and 3nm nodes. Since the number of crystals per unit area of the wafer is close to the physical limit of the semiconductor silicon material, the wafer performance can no longer be significantly improved year by year.

To solve this problem, TSMC's research team doped bismuth (Bi) into the two-dimensional material, which not only makes the product size challenge below 1 nm, but also effectively solves the problem of high resistance and low current of the two-dimensional material.

Normally, the more transistors there are, the more data the integrated circuit can store and the more processing power it has. Therefore, in order to obtain higher performance chips, semiconductor materials to challenge below 1nm is very necessary.

In addition to TSMC's proposed approach to effectively address the shortcomings of commercial chips, scientists at Penn State University have also proposed that transistors can be made from a single layer of molybdenum disulfide and tungsten disulfide semiconductor materials, which enable faster data processing of the manufactured semiconductor components.

Tungsten targets are preferred materials for diffusion barrier and bonding layers inside chips because of their high melting point, strong resistance to high temperatures, large electron emission coefficient, good chemical stability and excellent heat dissipation properties. In addition, most of the mainstream packaging materials for integrated circuits are made of tungsten - tungsten-copper alloy.

In addition to excellent electrochemical properties and heat dissipation, tungsten-copper alloy also has characteristics such as coefficient of thermal expansion that matches that of silicon and gallium arsenide, so it can make better performance in all aspects of the electronic packaging materials made.

From January to March 2021, the output of China's integrated circuits was about 82 billion pieces, up 62.1% year-on-year, while imported integrated circuits were 155.27 billion pieces, up 33.1% year-on-year. Note that domestic IC production capacity reached 29.09 billion blocks in March, an increase of 37.4% year-on-year. This shows that the domestic market demand for integrated circuits is strong and the growth rate of production is large. According to the budget, China may be able to achieve a 70% self-sufficiency rate of chips in 2025.