China Might Be 15 Years Behind US, ASML In Chipmaking Suggests Official Document

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With the latest sanctions by the Dutch government requiring ASML to seek licenses before it can sell older DUV based chip manufacturing machines, China has purportedly developed its own DUV scanner, according to a document published on the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s website.
Chip manufacturing machines have become a prized commodity for China since the latest equipment is only manufactured by ASML, and the local Chinese machine could help the country reduce reliance on Western products for advancing in the crucial industry in an era where artificial intelligence software requires the latest semiconductors for peak performance.
China Reveals Argon Fluoride Lithography Machine With Overlay Less Than 8nm In Government Implementation Guideline Document
The document outlines the three key details of China’s latest DUV lithography machine: resolution, wavelength, and overlay. The scanner is an Argon Fluoride machine, which has been used in the global semiconductor industry for roughly two decades.
It uses a 193 nanometer wavelength of light and can print chips with a resolution of 65 nanometers. This resolution was available to Dutch chip manufacturing equipment giant ASML’s customers through its ArF machines dating back to at least 2009.
In terms of ASML’s latest product portfolio, the closest match is the TWINSCAN XT:1460K scanner. This machine also has a resolution lower than 65 nanometers and uses a 193 nanometer Argon Fluoride light source. However, it is still more advanced than the Chinese machine since the overlay specification is less than 2.5 nanometers – far superior to the 8 nanometer overlay claimed by the Chinese ministry.
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Since semiconductor fabrication involves manipulating light to print minute circuits on a silicon wafer, its quality and technical parameters involve the manipulation of light. A chip machine’s resolution is simply defined as the minimum feature size that a machine can print. This size depends on a variety of other factors, out of which some of the most important are the machine’s numerical aperture, its depth of focus and the mask size.
Within these, a higher numerical aperture typically means lower resolution, allowing chip manufacturers to shrink chip sizes. A machine’s overlay is its ability to map out new patterns on existing patterns on a wafer. Since chip fabrication uses a mask to imprint circuit patterns for electrical conductivity, machines with smaller overlay capabilities are better since they allow the circuits to be tightly packed.
ASML first introduced its TWINSCAN chip machines in 2005. Since then, the firm has moved forward to immersion machines and the newer EUV tools that are slowly becoming the industry’s mainstay. Its TWINSCAN:XT 1460 scanner, which is the closest approximation to the currently available TWINSCAN:XT:1460K machine, first surfaced in the firm’s 2015 annual report with a resolution of 65 nanometers a light wavelength of 193 nanometers.
Before 1460, the 1450 scanner was present in annual reports dating back to 2009. This scanner had a resolution of 57 nanometers and was the latest machine in the firm’s non immersion lithography portfolio.