China 15 Years Behind in Top Chipmaking Tools, Says ASML Supplier
- On Thursday, Frank Rohmund, who leads the semiconductor division at Germany's Zeiss Group, stated it is a "reasonable assumption" that Beijing needs 15 years to develop extreme ultraviolet lithography machines.
- Zeiss components are used to produce around 80 per cent of the world's chips, making the company critical to US efforts blocking China from acquiring technology essential for advanced artificial intelligence chips.
- While China has made strides producing immersion deep ultraviolet lithography tools, the nation remains roughly a decade and a half behind in developing cutting-edge chipmaking technology, according to Rohmund.
- Rohmund warned that expanding export controls to include legacy DUV machines could prove counterproductive, arguing such restrictions "accelerates innovation in China" rather than limiting technological capabilities.
- EUV technology remains essential for producing the advanced processors used in Nvidia's accelerators, as the US and China continue competing for semiconductor dominance in the global artificial intelligence market.
14 Articles
14 Articles
The "Chinese Manhattan Project" is an analogy coined by an anonymous source in a Reuters report. China has already begun mass production of immersion DUV, but is stuck with EUV due to issues with light sources and mirrors. UBS and Zeiss this week gave projections that they will lag behind by ten and fifteen years, respectively.
It has been assessed that China's extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment technology lags behind global leaders by approximately 15 years. The diagnosis is that while China is accelerating the localization of semiconductor equipment, there remains a significant technological gap in the EUV sector, which is the core of cutting-edge processes. According to Bloomberg and other sources on the 3rd, Frank Rommund, who heads the semiconductor d…
(Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Lee Seong-han = It has been assessed that China is about 15 years behind in the field of cutting-edge semiconductor equipment.
According to estimates by investment bank UBS, China is several years behind ASML's technology in EUV lithography. Specifically, the bank states that China is currently at the point where ASML was in 2004 and estimates that it will not acquire the corresponding technological capability within the next 10 years. […]
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