In the second half of the 1990s, Samsung Electronics came to the forefront of Dataquest's DRAM manufacturer rankings. NEC and Toshiba were in second and third place, and other Japanese companies were ranked in the top 10.
The "globalization era" should be counted from the 1960s, when Japan and the Four Asian Tigers created a rare economic miracle by developing their industries one after another, as described by the "flying geese" theory. The period between the collapse of the USSR in 1990 and before the 2008 Beijing Olympics can be considered the golden years of "globalization."
In 1492, Queen Isabella of Spain drove out the Moors and supported Christopher Columbus in discovering the New World, evoking a pivotal moment in the Age of Discovery.
It has been half a century since the semiconductor industry began in the 1970s. At first, semiconductors were just a supporting component developed by large corporations to enhance the functionality of their system products. However, the formation of the industry began with Intel in Silicon Valley.
2030 will inaugurate a "Silicon Era" of quarter-finals competition among industrial nations, as applications such as electrical vehicles, connected cars, and artificial intelligence (AI) are advancing at exponential speeds.
In the decade since AlphaGo was introduced, neural networks in machine learning have been gradually applied to various industrial and commercial scenarios. One of the applications related to material development is the optimization of the material production process, which has been in industrial practice for some time.
There are three ways to grow the economic scale in the modern-day semiconductor industry: continuous miniaturization of processes, advanced packaging, and the application of new materials.
The importance of the semiconductor industry to Taiwan is self-evident. Among them, TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) holds a high global market share in advanced processes defined as below 10 nm. Therefore, whether it's Apple's mobile application processors, AI server GPUs, or custom ASICs required for cloud data centers, most of those advanced chips ultimately depend on TSMC's production.
The model FPA-1200NZ2C from Canon, a nanoscale imprinting machine, has been making headlines recently, although it first appeared in academic journals as early as 2015. The resurgence of an eight-year-old model in the news can be attributed to its imminent entry into broader semiconductor production applications.
Recently, the Japanese semiconductor equipment manufacturer Canon released the nanoimprint lithography (NIL) machine FPA-1200NZ2C, capable of achieving a 5-nanometer process node. Nanoimprint lithography is one of the methods in semiconductor manufacturing to transfer circuit design patterns onto wafers, with another well-known and widely used method being photolithography or optic lithography.
