La Chine se rapproche de l'autosuffisance dans le Chip Gear - à l'exception de la machine ASML construite à 350 millions de dollars

Lithography eats up nearly a quarter of global chip equipment spending, and China still can't make a single machine that projects a circuit pattern onto a wafer. According to Nikkei Asia, Beijing's 14th Five-Year Plan explicitly demands a fully domestic chip equipment supply chain – and SMIC, CXMT, and YMTC are racing to deliver. They've replaced foreign tools for etching, deposition, chemical polishing, and more, but lithography is a "blank spot," as one supply chain executive put it.

China's Domestic Drive Hits Lithography Wall

SMIC is expanding plants in Beijing to pump out 7nm and 14nm chips – the most advanced in China – but those fabs still rely on ASML or Nikon machines, even if older models. The industry group SEMI reports that lithography accounted for nearly 25% of global chipmaking equipment spending last year. For a country that wants to cut off dependency on Dutch and Japanese gear, that's a $50-billion-plus hole no domestically built tool fills today.

The $350 Million Beast China Cannot Replicate

ASML's high-NA EUV machine costs $350 million per unit. It weighs 150,000 kg, stretches 14 meters long by 4 meters high and 4 meters wide, and packs millions of components. Industry sources call it the most complex machine ever built. Inside, a powerful laser strikes 50,000 tiny droplets of tin per second to generate EUV light. The wafer stage positions each exposure with precision under a nanometer – about four silicon atoms – and checks and adjusts 20,000 times per second.

What It Would Take to Build a Chinese ASML

Key subsystems come from a European supply chain that took decades to mature: the laser from Trumpf, the EUV light source from Cymer, precision mechanical parts from VDL, and the projection optics – the smoothest surface ever made by humans – from Carl Zeiss. China would need to replicate all of that, plus the integrated system-level engineering that ASML has perfected in Veldhoven. One supply chain executive told Nikkei: "Most production lines are still using ASML or Nikon machines, even if those are their older models."

Unless China cracks the optics, laser, and stage precision problems that took ASML and its European partners decades to solve, the country's chip ambitions will remain tethered to foreign systems – and the U.S. knows it.

Source: Can China build its own ASML?
Domain: nikkei.shorthandstories.com