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(1) The first photonic chip production line in China was officially mass-produced
Recently, the photonic chip production line jointly developed by the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation has been officially mass-produced. This is an important milestone in China's research and development in the field of photonic chips!
Photonic chips can meet the market needs of communications, data centers, lidar, microwave photonics, medical testing and other fields. After the completion of the production line, it will fill the gap in the field of optical quantum chip wafer foundry in mainland China, and is expected to accelerate the large-scale process of domestic photonic chip replacement.
(2) China's chip industry has gone through a difficult development process
Looking back at China's chip industry, there are four main stages:
The first stage was the independent research and development stage from 1965 to 1978.
The second phase was the introduction and enhancement phase from 1978 to 1990.
The third stage was the key development and construction stage from 1990 to 1999.
The fourth stage is the year 2000 - the current period of rapid development.
After decades of development, China's chip industry is mainly responsible for the packaging and testing links in the downstream of the industrial chain, while the design and manufacturing links in the upstream of the industrial chain are mainly concentrated in other countries or regions such as South Korea, Japan, and the United States. Although Huawei's Kirin 9000 high-end chip independently developed and designed by HiSilicon, it represents the world's most advanced chip level. However, the key core technology, key equipment and materials of the chip have long been subject to people. Such as EDA tools, wafers and lithography machines are monopolized imports by developed countries. So that after the United States decided to sanction Huawei in 2018, Huawei, as the global leader in 5G technology, has been unable to ship Huawei 5G mobile phones because TSMC refuses to manufacture 5G chips.
(3) Deeply cultivate the breakthrough of photonic chip technology and seek to change lanes and overtake
In 1969, Bell Labs in the United States first proposed the concept of photonic chips. In 2018, the team of Jin Xianmin of Shanghai Jiao Tong University successfully developed the first photonic computing chip in China. Huawei has successfully developed photonic chip design software, which is also the world's fastest quantum gate software, helping the industry to develop towards scale. Huawei's research and development in the chip field has never given up, and Huawei has taken the initiative to invest in Microsource Photonics and Changguang Huaxin. Kirin chips are expected to return next year, with silicon-based chips and photonic chips going hand in hand. On May 27, 2019, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post website reported that Yin Huaxiang, an expert in the field of microelectronic devices and integration technology at the Institute of Microelectronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his team have developed 3-nanometer transistors.
In July 2020, the state issued a chip mobilization order, requiring a 70% self-sufficiency rate of domestic chips by 2025, and established a "chip university" for this purpose, built a "Oriental Core Port" with huge funds, and introduced a large number of preferential policies. Among them, it includes simultaneous breakthroughs in the two technical routes of photonic chips and traditional electronic chips. In February 2021, the Tsinghua team discovered a new light source that can be used for photonic chips. In August 2021, Guo Guangcan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led a scientific research team to successfully make a major breakthrough in the core technology of photonic chips. In 2022, according to Peking University News Network, the latest Nature article by Professor Wang Xingjun's team reported that a major breakthrough has been made in photonic integrated chips and microsystems, which is also the world's first case to report a new silicon-based optoelectronic on-chip integrated system driven by an integrated microcavity light comb.
Pan Jianwei, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in an interview that with the successful breakthrough of photonic chip technology, China will get rid of the dilemma of chip stuck in the neck in the past and lead the development of the global semiconductor industry in the future.
(4) The performance of photonic chips is far better than that of traditional electronic chips
The biggest difference between the chip and the traditional electronic chip is that it uses light as a carrier, replaces electricity with light, and integrates a large number of optical quantum devices on the chip by using micro-nano processing technology. Compared with electronic chips, this chip has a higher degree of integration, greater precision, and more stability, and also has better compatibility.
Because of the different manufacturing processes, optical quantum chips can be produced without the need for a lithography machine. This also means that the current state-of-the-art 5nm and 3nm chip processes will no longer be the top chip technology, and the pursuit of smaller nanometer chips will completely lose its meaning. The limit of electronic chips is 0.1 nanometers, which is the physical limit of lithography machines for electronic chip manufacturing equipment.
Compared with electronic chips, photonic chips have lower structural requirements, generally in the 100-nanometer range, thus reducing the dependence on advanced processes. This means that Continental's current 14-nanometer-level production technology can fully meet the production needs of photonic chips. Photonic chips bode well for larger applications.
In terms of performance, photonic chips can compute about 1,000 times faster than electronic chips. The ability to quickly transfer large amounts of information illustrates that optical processors are ideally suited to handle the large amounts of computation that drive AI models. For example, an AI photonic chip is a chip design that closely matches the photonic computing architecture and AI algorithms, and has the potential to be widely used in key AI fields such as autonomous driving, security monitoring, speech recognition, image recognition, medical diagnosis, gaming, virtual reality, industrial IoT, enterprise-level servers and data centers.
At the same time, photonic chips consume less power than electronic chips. In the same case, the power consumption of a photonic chip is 1/100 that of an electronic chip. In 2020, the annual power consumption of domestic data centers was 204.5 billion kWh, accounting for 2.7% of the total electricity consumption of the whole society, while the power generation of the Three Gorges Power Station that year was 111.8 billion kWh. In other words, the electricity consumed by one year's data storage is close to the power generated by the two Three Gorges power stations. Electricity alone accounts for 60%-70% of the total cost of running a data center. If you replace electronic chips with photonic chips, only one single item of data storage can save 200 billion kWh of electricity a year!
Combined with the above advantages, photonic chips are considered to be one of the most promising solutions in the fields of large-capacity data transmission and artificial intelligence accelerated computing in the future, and also provide a good opportunity for the domestic chip industry to "change lanes and overtake".
Upgrading from electronic chips to photonic chips is a major strategic opportunity for China's chips to change lanes and overtake.
(5) The conversion of chips from electricity to light is a strategic opportunity for the mainland to catch up
In terms of basic theory, China is basically on the same level as the United States. American scientists invented the world's first ruby laser in 1960. In 1961, the Changchun Institute of Optical Machinery of the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed China's first ruby laser.
In terms of technology, China and foreign countries have their own advantages. For example, in the research of photonic integration technology, the Xi'an Institute of Optics and Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Semiconductors, Shanghai Institute of Microsystems, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology have carried out long-term research.
In terms of sales market, 1.15 trillion chips were sold worldwide in 2021, with sales reaching a record $555.9 billion, a year-on-year increase of 26%. China remains the world's largest consumer market for chips, with sales up 27.1% year-on-year to $192.5 billion. The decisive force for the development of photonic chips is the market, and only strong market demand can bring huge technology research and development funds to photonic chips. The massive investment is the guarantee for the development of photonic chip technology.
In terms of industrial chain, China has the most complete industrial chain in the world. Once the commercial market in the field of photonic chips is opened, Chinese companies are bound to become the main force in this field. Recently, Huawei invested in Microsource Photonics and Changguang Huaxin, GF launched new silicon photonics technology, and New Cisco launched the world's first open silicon photonics platform... A number of large manufacturers at home and abroad have accelerated the exploration and layout of the "optical chip" track.
The photonic chip production line jointly developed by the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation has been officially mass-produced. This is an important milestone in China's research and development in the field of photonic chips! History will once again confirm Bill. Gates once said the classic saying: "Repression will only accelerate China's growth and transcendence."