On December 23, 2024, the U.S. government announced the launch of a new round of "Section 301 investigations", pointing the finger at China's mature process chip semiconductor industry, less than a month after 140 Chinese semiconductor companies were added to the "entity list".
Since the outbreak of Sino-US trade frictions in 2018, the domestic semiconductor industry has faced various unfair means such as increased tariffs, entity lists, and Section 301 investigations, which have almost become the norm. Despite this, the domestic semiconductor industry is developing rapidly in a difficult situation, and independent and controllable and domestic substitution have become the mainstream trend, but the problem of "stuck neck" is still severe. As a core component of semiconductor production equipment, semiconductor robots are also heavily relied on by foreign brands.
In the context of trade policy uncertainty and increasing sanctions, the chip manufacturing industry has an increasingly urgent demand for the localization of semiconductor robots.
From entering the game to breaking the game, we will do the domestic substitution of semiconductor robots
Shenzhen ADTECH Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "STEP ADTECH"), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Xinshida in the first echelon of the domestic SCARA robot industry, has seen the urgency of "localization of semiconductor equipment" very early, and began to pay attention to the subdivision of semiconductor robots in 2017.
Adhering to the sense of mission of family and country feelings and localization substitution, STEP ADTECH resolutely entered the game, and in the process of contacting semiconductor companies, it continued to study and precipitate the industry Konw-how.
In 2020, STEP ADTECH successfully developed the first SA series wafer robot, which has the function of single-chip and multi-wafer pick-and-place, equipped with wafer presence detection sensor, and reached the Class 1 clean level, achieving a product breakthrough from 0 to 1.
For different semiconductor manufacturing process sections, STEP ADTECH has developed a variety of atmospheric and vacuum manipulator series products, which can transmit wafers of different sizes from 2 inches to 12 inches, and has been used in EFEM, Stocker, furnace tube, wet process, gluing and developing, film and other semiconductor equipment process processing to complete the application of pick-and-place, loading and unloading, and testing.
STEP ADTECH is a series of semiconductor wafer handling robot products
In the most critical lithography process of semiconductor manufacturing, it takes a long time and has high cost, among which more than a dozen processes such as gluing and developing need to be carried out repeatedly, and the precision, speed and stability of the robot are quite high.
After 6 years of precipitation, the wafer robot of Xinshi Dazhongxing has initially achieved domestic substitution in terms of product performance, and relying on the localization market accumulation of the original industrial robot, it has more advantages in terms of return on investment and service response speed than foreign brands.
At the same time, another highly differentiated and competitive feature of STEP ADTECH is that it deploys customized products according to local and time conditions according to the non-standard customization capabilities of different wafer manufacturers in various process segments of semiconductor manufacturing, so as to better meet the production needs of the original production line, improve the chip output efficiency and yield rate in an all-round way, and form a differentiated advantage in service compared with foreign brands that only make standard products in wafer robots.
In the survey of high-tech robots, some wafer factories said that the robot system adapted to STEP ADTECH effectively reduces the overall investment cost of production equipment, and more effectively ensures the safety of domestic industrial production under the condition of ensuring quality.
In the sense of urgency of threats, supply cuts, and sanctions, more and more domestic semiconductor manufacturers have begun to look for domestic alternatives from the entire industry chain. The ingenuity of Xinshi Dazhong Weixing to adhere to the "difficult but correct road", break through step by step from scratch, and ensure the stable iteration of products and solutions, has gradually gained the recognition of more semiconductor equipment companies.
At present, STEP ADTECH semiconductor robot has been applied in the production lines of analog chips, power chips and sensor chips in multiple wafer factories.
Resilient growth against the trend, building a broad moat from point to surface
The innovative breakthrough in the application of the semiconductor industry is the strategic epitome of STEP ADTECH's insistence on independent self-research of technology, actively responding to market changes, and continuously exploring new application scenarios.
Looking back on the whole 2024, the 3C electronics industry will pick up, the production capacity of the photovoltaic and lithium battery industries will continue to be digested, and the output value will decline, and the data of the Advanced Robot Industry Research Institute (GGII) predicts that the domestic industrial robot shipments in 2024 will be 300,000 units, a year-on-year decrease of 5.06% compared with 2023.
Despite the slowdown in the overall shipment volume of the industrial robot industry, benefiting from the stable development and expansion of AI large models, AI chips, 3C electronics, and the automotive industry, the SCARA robot of STEP ADTECH still maintained stable growth.
Gaogong Robot learned through research that Xinshida can grow against the trend during the market adjustment period in 2024, mainly because of the accurate judgment of market changes and actively taking a variety of response plans to enhance the market competitiveness of products.
Emphasis is placed on core control, and the technology in the five major fields is independent and controllable
At present, the industrial robot market pattern is transitioning from chaotic competition to high-quality development, and technological innovation will be the fundamental source of corporate profits and market structure. Through 22 years of continuous accumulation, STEP ADTECH has mastered the core independent technology in the five major fields of controller, control algorithm, robot ontology, machine vision, software and application technology, and has 168 technical benefits and 48 invention advantages, and continues to iterate and upgrade.
Among them, the field of industrial control is the core technology of STEP ADTECH, and the self-developed technologies such as drive and control integration, vibration suppression, fast start and stop, trajectory planning, and dynamic high-order algorithms have maintained a leading position, and established a broad moat in the field of robot core control.
In 2015, the "integrated drive and control" robot controller product pioneered by STEP ADTECH brought cross-era changes to the underlying architecture of the controller, and adopted the "multi-core heterogeneous" control mode in the processor, so that the control core has different architecture, clock frequency and power consumption characteristics, and better adapted to different kinds of tasks.