Why are chip tapeouts so expensive?

Why are chip tapeouts so expensive? Spray photoresist onto MEMS wafer – Cheersonic

The chip industry is no stranger to tape-out.

The so-called tape-out is to manufacture chips through a series of process steps like an assembly line. This link is in the middle stage of chip design and chip mass production, and is a key link in chip manufacturing.

To put it simply, it is to hand over the designed solution to the chip manufacturer, first produce several dozens of samples, check whether the designed chip can be used, and then optimize it. If the test passes, mass production begins as such.

Therefore, in order to test whether the integrated circuit design is successful, tape-out must be performed. This is also an important reason why chip design companies generally need to invest a lot of money in the early stage.

From design to mass production of a chip, tape-out is a very critical link. When the chip is completely designed, it needs to be etched on the wafer according to the drawings. What kind of process technology is used, what size of the wafer, and the complexity of the chip will affect the success rate and cost of the chip, and many chips are It is not a one-time tape-out success, and it often takes multiple tape-outs to obtain a more ideal effect.

But tape-out is a very expensive thing, and if the tape-out fails several times, it may bring down the company. Some chip manufacturers have calculated this account. 14nm process chips cost about 3 million US dollars per tapeout, 7nm process chips cost 30 million US dollars per tapeout, and 5nm process chips cost 47.25 million US dollars per tapeout. It can be seen that tape-out is a huge expense for chip design companies, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises in the industry. The actual cost of tape-out is much higher than that of large manufacturers, which makes the poor “life” even worse.

Why is the price of chip tape-out so expensive?

This is to mention the manufacturing principle of the chip.

Chip manufacturing requires hundreds of millions of transistors to be placed in a very small chip, and the manufacturing process has reached the nanoscale, which can only be done by photolithography. Lithography is to use lithography to etch the desired pattern. Lithography needs to use a mask (also known as a mask, Mask). The mask is to engrave the designed circuit diagram on it. engraved graphics.

Taping out is expensive, on the one hand, because there are many processes that need to be verified at the beginning, from a circuit diagram to a chip, to check whether each process step is feasible and whether the circuit has the required performance and functions. The chip tape-out process lasts for at least three months (including raw material preparation, lithography, doping, electroplating, packaging and testing), and generally requires more than 1,000 processes. The production cycle is long, so it is also the most important and expensive in chip manufacturing. link.

If the tape-out is successful, chips can be manufactured on a large scale; otherwise, it is necessary to find out the reasons and optimize the design accordingly.

Among them, chip tapeout is expensive, mainly in masks and wafers. These two items are expensive and are consumables. Among them, the mask is the most expensive, and the price of a mask for a mid-end process is about 50 About $10,000, and the price of a wafer is also in the thousands of dollars.

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