Why helium is the acute risk In front-end processing, steps including cleaning, film deposition, lithography, dry etching and inspection repeat 50 to 100 times or more per silicon wafer, sometimes over 1,000 steps in total. Helium and naphtha are the two materials a fab cannot do without. In dry etching, intense heat passes from plasma … Read more
A Huawei lifer’s bet Founder and CEO Yang Bin spent more than two decades at Huawei, building the company’s processor team from scratch in the US and later leading wireless baseband algorithms and chip work, with long experience in large-scale hardware scheduling and data architecture. He sums up entrepreneurship as ‘the realisation of everything you … Read more
Jieluo Intelligent Equipment (Suzhou) has broken ground on a headquarters project in Suzhou’s Wuzhong district, a 1.2 billion yuan bet on the robots that move wafers around the world’s cleanest factories. The site covers 42.5 mu and about 70,000 square metres, and is designed to build 2,000 trackless-navigation robots (AMRs) and 500 wafer-intelligent-storage systems a … Read more
Zeng Yi, founder of Shenzhen-based processor IP firm Sunzhan, speaks softly with a Teochew lilt, but on AI and RISC-V his excitement is uncontainable. His thesis: AI has toppled the old processor order, and RISC-V is the arch it drags forward. When the model decides the chip ‘The decision power over chip architecture has moved … Read more