Christophe Fouquet, the CEO of ASML, is not the first expert to give his opinion on the state of development of the Chinese integrated circuit industry. Gerald Yin Zhiyao, the president and CEO of AMEC (Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment China), one of the largest Chinese companies specialized in equipment design and production involved in the manufacturing of integrated circuits, gave his opinion at the end of last July.
At that time he maintained that chip manufacturing equipment of Chinese origin is between 5 and 10 years behind its most advanced competitors in terms of quality and reliability. On the other hand, Zeng Liaoyuan, associate professor of telecommunications engineering at the Chengdu University of Technology and Electronics, in China, predicts that his country will take at least two decades to develop the capacity to manufacture advanced semiconductors comparable to those produced by its rivals. Western and Asian.
The ban on the export of EUV machines has seriously damaged China
The two decades that Liaoyuan and other experts say China needs to develop its own advanced lithography equipment suspiciously coincides with the time ASML needed to invest in developing its UVE photolithography machine. Currently SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp), the largest Chinese chipmaker, is capable of producing 7nm, and possibly also 5nm, integrated circuits using ASML’s deep ultraviolet equipment and a technique known as multiple patterning.
The inability to access the most advanced lithography equipment that ASML produces is a big problem for China
This semiconductor manufacturing strategy broadly consists of transferring the pattern to the wafer in several passes with the purpose of increasing the resolution of the lithographic process. It works, but the problem is that it has an upward impact on the cost of chips and a downward impact on production capacity. It is evident that the inability to access the most advanced lithography equipment produced by ASML It’s a big problem for China. And it is because sanctions are depriving the country led by Xi Jinping of developing the capacity to manufacture its own cutting-edge integrated circuits.
Christophe Fouquet’s statements point precisely in that direction. And during an interview with the Dutch newspaper NRC, this executive stated that “by prohibiting the export of extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment, China has been left between 10 and 15 years behind the West. And this has a very clear effect.” . It is important that we do not overlook that these words were spoken by the person who currently runs the company that is prevented by sanctions from the governments of the United States and the Netherlands from selling its best chip manufacturing machines to its Chinese customers.
A few months before leaving his position as CEO of ASML, Peter Wennink predicted that his company will lose approximately 15% of its sales in China due to the sanctions that came into effect on November 16, 2023. It is evident that the situation current tension between China on one side, and the US and its allies on the other, it is unfavorable not only for ASMLbut also for other companies, such as NVIDIA, AMD or the Japanese Tokyo Electron, among many others. Be that as it may, as we have just seen, it seems that experts agree that currently China’s semiconductor industry is at least a decade behind those of the US, Taiwan, South Korea or Japan.
Image | ASML
More information | NRC
In WorldOfSoftware | ASML is selling less lithography equipment. Sanctions on China are only partly responsible
