Hanmi Semiconductor - China's antidote to EUV crisis?

The semiconductor industry is built around top-down lithography

Modern chips are manufactured by:

1. Growing ultra-pure silicon crystals

2. Slicing them into wafers

3. Depositing films

4. Patterning features through lithography

5. Etching and repeating hundreds of times

Every fab, supply chain, design tool, and process engineer is optimized for this approach. ASML's dominance comes from producing structures at nanometer scale reliably and repeatedly.

Interestingly, China has been investing heavily in areas that partially reduce dependence on EUV:

Advanced Packaging

Companies like:

• Hanmi Semiconductor (Korea) - provide the packaging equipment

• JCET (China), Tongfu Microelectronics, Tianshui Huatian work on packing process

show that packaging can sometimes create performance gains without needing the smallest lithographic node.

Chiplets

Instead of:

• One huge monolithic die

Use:

• Multiple smaller dies

• Advanced interconnects

This reduces pressure on leading-edge lithography.

DUV Multipatterning

SMIC's reported 7 nm-class products are believed to rely heavily on advanced DUV techniques rather than EUV.

This is expensive but avoids the immediate EUV bottleneck.

Using these insights and several other streams of directions in the Semiconductor industry, Hanmi Semiconductor Co. Ltd. have been presented with a market strategy to prepare their product lines for the future of Semiconductor industry. To make that strategy viable, a supply chain trasnformation startegy has been suggested. Thereafter, an enterprise architecture strategy to make sure tht the vision of the executives reach each and every personnel in the organisation seamlessly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XnFNHoJhow