24 million yuan! SMIC spends a lot of money to retain Liang Mengsong: Go all out to sprint to 7nm process

For SMIC, retaining Liang Mengsong should be a matter of no suspense. On June 25, SMIC held its first extraordinary shareholders' meeting in 2021, during which Liang Mengsong will be granted 400,000 restricted shares with a market value of approximately 24 million yuan.

The remuneration details show that Liang Mengsong received a total remuneration of US$4.93 million in 2020, the highest among all directors and executives. In comparison, in 2019, Liang Mengsong "only" received a remuneration of US$341,000, even less than Chief Financial Officer Gao Yonggang.

However, in a small note, SMIC explained the reason. It turned out that the total remuneration of US$4.93 million included a house worth US$3.4 million (approximately RMB 22.33 million), which was given by the company to Liang Mengsong for his home living.

Liang Mengsong graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley with a Ph.D. and has 35 years of experience in the industry. From 1992 to 2009, he held important positions at TSMC, and finally became the senior R&D director in charge of TSMC's advanced process research and development.

He has published more than 350 papers and holds more than 450 patents, and can be said to be a national treasure.

In his previous resignation incident, Liang Mengsong stated that he had served as co-CEO of SMIC for more than three years since November 2017, and had almost never taken a vacation. With the dedicated efforts of more than 2,000 engineers led by him, SMIC completed five generations of technology development from 28nm to 7nm process.

According to Liang Mengsong, SMIC's "28nm, 14nm, 12nm and N+1 technologies have all entered mass production, and the development of 7nm technology has been completed, and it will be ready for risk mass production in April next year.

The eight most critical and difficult technologies for 5nm and 3nm have also been deployed in an orderly manner, and we will enter the full development stage once the EUV lithography machine arrives."

Of course, advanced processes below the 7-process are still just technical research and development and cannot be mass-produced due to the lack of key EUV lithography equipment.

Currently, SMIC has completed the production capacity construction target of 15,000 wafers per month for the 14nm process. The next focus will be on the N+1 and N+2 generation processes. Although the official has not disclosed the specific number, the industry believes that the N+1 process is about 8 to 10nm nodes, and the N+2 process is about 7nm nodes.

The N+1 process has already started risk trial production and will go into mass production in the second half of this year. The N+2 process will go into mass production next year, which means that the domestically produced 7nm process will be seen as early as next year.