China's EUV Technology 'At A Similar Stage To ASML In 2004,' Analyst Claims
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
Beijing's Semiconductor Industry Remains Well Behind Western Rivals
Historically, over a dozen companies produced lithography tools. However, as they became more complex, only ASML, Canon, and Nikon survived, with ASML being the undisputed market leader and the only maker of EUV lithography scanners.
As China is essentially developing a parallel semiconductor ecosystem, there have been reports of multiple entities working on lithography systems, including Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment (SMEE), AMIES (which seems to be a SMEE spin-off that includes Aishengna and Yuliangsheng units), SiCarrier (reportedly controlled by Huawei), and even Naura (which denies that it is developing litho tools). SMEE, which was established in 2002, is by far the most important established Chinese manufacturer of litho tools. Meanwhile, so far none of China-based makers of lithography have established mass production of immersion DUV scanners capable of producing chips at 45nm and below.
SMEE reportedly formally introduced its first immersion DUV lithography system called SSA/800-10W and capable of making chips on nodes down to 28nm back in 2023. However, there have been no evidence that SMEE has indeed started mass production of the SSA/800-10W and that it has been adopted by a single manufacturer for mass production of chips. While it is conceivable that not all chipmakers announce deployment of breakthrough tools, especially keeping in mind that Chinese vendors like SMEE have plenty of foreign suppliers, we would have seen at least some indirect evidence (starting from procurement/acceptance records as well as component orders all the way to job postings and scientific papers) that SMEE started shipments of the SSA/800-10W in 2023 - 2024 by now, assuming of course that there were any shipments.
Interestingly, but the reports about China-made immersion DUV scanners now mass-produced by Shanghai Aishengna Electronic Technology Group (a unit, or an affiliate of SMEE) re-emerged this July, again, without any evidence. This time around, the reports did not even mention targeted nodes or throughput capabilities. To make matters even more suspicious is the lack of reports about shipments of evaluation tools to chipmakers (like ASML does this with its High-NA EUV machines) as well as preliminary results of their process qualifications (like Intel does with ASML's High-NA EUV machines).
For a first-ever Chinese immersion scanner, it is reasonable to expect Chinese chipmakers to use it on engineering wafers, characterize it against ASML machines, develop recipes, identify drawbacks, and pass that information back to SMEE, something that should take about a year. Only once that first machine performs adequately does it make sense to order and qualify multiple SSA/800-10W units for mass production. In fact, such qualification will likely take another year for a single layer and more time for additional layers. To that end, an insertion of an all-new lithography scanner into an existing flow will take at least two years, but likely more. To that end, once SMEE (or its business units) and its customers figure out how the first Chinese immersion scanner should work, these scanners will still be far from mass deployment.
In any case, without any real indicators that Chinese makers of wafer fab tools can produce and ship immersion lithography scanners to customers, we can only state what the UBS analyst did: China's lithography industry is in a position where ASML was in the mid-2000s.
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