Only one company in the world currently has functioning EUV machines, and it has sued a Chinese engineer for stealing trade secrets.
China’s semiconductor industry has reached an important milestone, with reports claiming it has built its first extreme ultraviolet prototype.EUV lithography is a complex, secretive manufacturing process that produces the world’s most advanced chips.
Only one company in the world, Dutch firm ASML, is capable of harnessing the process.The US has desperately tried to keep this technology out of China’s hands. Now, though, new reports claim China has its first domestic prototype of the state-of-the-art chipmaking machines.China’s new EUV prototypeTo date, EUV lithography machines have been made by only a single firm, ASML in the Netherlands. For several years, though, China has been pushing towards an EUV breakthrough.According to a report by WCCFtech, Chinese companies such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation have been attempting to replicate ASML’s technology by poaching talent and reverse-engineering parts.Now, a Reuters report reveals that China has finally made a breakthrough. The nation has developed its own EUV lithography prototype. According to the report, China has relied on old ASML parts for its breakthrough. ASML has previously sued a former Chinese engineer for stealing trade secrets, winning an $845 million judgment in 2019.The emergence of new technology means China has advanced farther than experts expected. In April, ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said China would need “many, many years” to develop this kind of technology.How do EUV lithography machines work?EUV lithography machines were built on decades of global research. These machines train an incredibly powerful laser beam on a tiny droplet of molten tin. This leads to an explosion that creates a massive burst of ultraviolet light, which is funneled onto a wafer of silicon. This allows the team at ASML to etch circuits as fine as a strand of DNA. Until now, only ASML has been able to build the machines capable of making the state-of-the-art chip. According to the company’s website, it invested more than €6 billion in EUV R&D over 17 years.Though China has made an important breakthrough, it isn’t producing EUV chips yet, according to the Reuters report. However, sources claim the nation is now aiming to make EUV mainstream by 2030.With the ongoing AI boom, the US and China are racing to bolster their chipmaking capabilities. In China, Huawei is building a network of facilities in collaboration with SMIC. In the US, the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act authorized approximately $280 billion in new funding to revitalize domestic semiconductor manufacturing.
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