China's another technological breakthrough, high-end targets to break the U.

China is another technology breakthrough, it is the target.

The target was China's high-tech grief, ITO target as an example.

In 2018, China's Ministry of Science and Technology listed ITO targets as one of China's 35 technologies that are in urgent need of breakthrough, because this technology has stuck us for 20 years.

Many people may not know what the target is, so they don't know much about its importance.

In fact, it is widely used, and it is in high-tech fields, such as chips, photovoltaics, screens and so on.

We won't talk about the chip. We have been stuck around the neck all the time. The target is one of the materials we must conquer in the chip. Photovoltaic is relatively special. China has absolute advantages in photovoltaic technology and output, but there are really few high-end photovoltaic targets that need to rely on imported technologies.

The same is true for screens such as LCD and OLED. The target material in the screen is ITO target material. In 2021, China's local supply of ITO target material accounts for about 48%, but it is basically in the low-end field, and the high-end field is basically dependent on imports.

It can be said that once the target is cut off, many Chinese technologies will become rootless trees.

For example: in 2021, when China's photovoltaic production is expanding at a critical moment, Japanese enterprises will give priority to the supply of target materials to other foreign enterprises, not only leading to China's domestic enterprises facing a shortage of target materials, prices rose by about 20%, but also let the photovoltaic industry is also in a capacity dilemma.

It is such an important material, but for 20 years, it has been in the hands of Japan, the United States and other enterprises, and has been highly blocked against us, resulting in the restriction of our upstream and downstream industries.

Now, this technology has finally been conquered by Chinese scientists, and two at a time.

In 2020, He Jilin, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, led the team to successfully develop the key technology for the preparation of high-performance ITO sputtering targets and won the second prize of international technology, achieving a breakthrough in high-end ITO targets from 0 to 1.

In the same year, Professor Liu Qing's team of Chongqing University also won the second prize for the development of ultra-high-purity metal targets, which also achieved a breakthrough of 0, making Chinese chips available with high-end targets.

The Chinese target industry uses a single point of chip breakthrough to describe this technology.

As a result, Chinese targets have opened up a vigorous domestic substitution. The industry was once very excited. It is predicted that Chinese targets will usher in ten times the growth space in the future, but its significance is not only itself, but also has great significance for both upstream and downstream.

When the ion beam hits the target, the atoms on the target are knocked out, and then the atoms can gather on the object, forming a very thin film on the surface of the object.

Because this layer of film is made of metal and ions, its biggest function is to conduct electricity. For example, the glass used for the screen is originally non-conductive, but with this layer of film covering, it has the function of conducting electricity, as well as the circuit of the chip and the substrate of the photovoltaic.

It sounds very simple. In fact, according to the raw materials, it is really common. Generally, it can be divided into three types, one is metal target, the other is oxide target, and the other is alloy target. These raw materials are not rare. What is rare is that their requirements must be very thin and high in purity, and there must be no impurities.

For example, chip targets in the chip field are generally required to reach 5N level, that is, 99.999, while the purity of common metals on the market is generally only 95% to 97%.

Therefore, this kind of target material must be prepared in a vacuum, and a grain of dust cannot be found. It is a truly high-tech basic material. The development of the target material is actually inseparable from the coating technology.

At present, the more advanced coating preparation technology is sputtering.

This technology was discovered in 1842, when a scientist named Gopov discovered the phenomenon of cathode sputtering in the laboratory, that is, the atoms emitted by the cathode will run to the anode or the wall of the vacuum chamber, just like splashing water, so it is also called sputtering.

So some people think that if you use this technology to prepare films, you can prepare films as thin as atoms, but this technology is too difficult.

Because there is no way to control the direction of atomic sputtering, just like we clean up, dust is flying all over the sky, you can't control its landing point, and the atoms are too small, it takes a long time to prepare a large number of films first.

So for the next few decades, this technology has not been commercially available.

After 1950, scientists proposed high-frequency sputtering technology and magnetron sputtering, which is to use high-frequency current and add magnetic field to restrain particles to increase the density of plasma.

Sputtering technology was officially commercialized, and the development of the target material was also kicked off at this time.

After 1980, electronic industries such as chips, memory, LCD displays, and capacitors began to explode, and materials such as sputtering targets gradually emerged.

Due to the high-tech threshold, four companies in the United States and Japan account for half of the country, of which Japan's Japanese mining metals and Tosao account for more than half of the market, while Honeywell and Praxair in the United States account for 1/3, and the rest is divided up by other countries. Even if it is as strong as Europe, it can only buy from these companies.

In 1990, China also noticed targets, but China was busy developing large-scale industries and did not have much energy to focus on them. This is because targets are special and one of its markets is very small. In 2000, there were only more than 50 global target manufacturers, and the largest number of enterprises was hundreds.

Compared with cars and home appliances, this scale has a very large gap. This situation is like a ballpoint pen refill. It is tasteless to eat and a pity to discard it.

However, the biggest difference between the target material and the refill is that the refill is only the core technology of the ballpoint pen, while the target material is becoming more and more important, which is related to whether the screen, chip and other industries can realize independent control.

Especially in 2000, China's liquid crystal display, dot matrix display production has leapt to the world's first, but for the screen ITO target all rely on imports.

Without targets, China will always lack cores and screens.

It is against this background that several scientific research institutions in China began to try the research and development of targets. Take He Jilin as an example, he began to study targets in the mid-1990s.

At that time, it seemed to him that the target was not a very difficult thing. He could do it completely.

Because this technology can be applied to chips and screens, it is highly confidential. Foreign countries have imposed a comprehensive technical blockade on our country, not only imposing a strict equipment embargo, but also adopting strict confidentiality for related technologies and materials.

Target production and manufacturing is divided into four major links, namely metal purification, target manufacturing, sputtering coating, and downstream product applications, and these four links are lacking in China.

So He Jilin set up a research team in Zhengzhou University, and then cooperated with Fujian Ashichuang, Jinglian Optoelectronics, Jiangfeng Electronics and other enterprises. In the following years, He Jilin's team successively invented ITO target powder preparation, related sintering, molding and other key technologies, and established mature technological processes and standards.

Now this process has been applied to Ashtron Target Company and adopted by BOE.

In 2020, He Jilin's team won the second prize of the National Technology Invention Award. His process broke the problem of key technologies and equipment sticking necks, and achieved a breakthrough in the independent system of ITO targets from scratch.

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