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 Nikkei teardown of a low-cost Chinese humanoid has stirred debate in Japanese engineering circles, with veteran roboticists conceding that China’s mass-production logic, not raw component precision, now sets the tempo of the field. The details that stung The engineers were struck less by headline tech than by unglamorous choices. The screw threads felt unusually … Read more
The narrative that battery makers only earn thin margins is over. At the 2026 Greater Bay Area auto show, only two power-battery makers, CALB and Gotion High-tech, took independent stages, and in the first four months of the year their installed volumes differed by just 0.14 GWh, a 0.08 per cent gap in share, slotting … Read more
China’s robot sector is shifting from concept hype to order ramp and profit realisation. Half-year 2026 results show the whole chain — from core parts to whole-machine integration — taking off at once. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology says that from January to May, industrial-scale robot enterprises booked revenue above 90 billion yuan, … Read more
Figure Robotics’ F02 humanoid robot featuring a high-degree-of-freedom dexterous hand.Illustration: humanoid robot dexterous-hand durability concerns. (Source: Sohu IT) China’s humanoid robots are being tested by reality, and reality is winning. A manager at one robotics firm, whom we will call Wang Hao, told Chinese business outlet Yicai that the dexterous hand his company sources from … Read more