Yet, it is unclear how any engineers from China could reverse engineer an EUV lithography scanner, as the Dutch company has never supplied one to China and hardly taught personnel from China how to service its EUV systems that are not allowed to be shipped to the People's Republic.
Reverse engineering a machine that contains over 100,000 parts is a hard task that takes hundreds of engineers with knowledge of the matter, which is why the secret entity led by the Government of China hired not only former engineers from ASML China, but also former employees of the Dutch company from elsewhere, presumably from Europe, Taiwan, and the U.S. For example, Lin Nan, formerly responsible for EUV light source technology at ASML, now leads a team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Optics that has filed eight EUV-related patents in just 18 months. Yet, this may mean that he uses his experience and knowledge rather than trying to replicate what he did at ASML or reverse engineer what he did at ASML due to the absence of an EUV scanner in his lab.
“It makes sense that companies would want to replicate our technology, but doing so is no small feat,” a statement by ASML published by Reuters reads.
The report says that around 100 recent university graduates are tasked with reverse-engineering parts from EUV and DUV lithography tools, with each workplace monitored by a dedicated camera that records the disassembly and reassembly process, an important part of the whole China's lithography program, according to the report. Employees who successfully put components back together receive bonuses. Yet again, a Twinscan NXE tool is a mechanism consisting of over 100,000 parts working together, not just a sum of all parts.
To sum up, China has reportedly built a secret prototype EUV lithography system and begun testing it, which suggests that the country may be closer to reproducing the most advanced chipmaking technology in existence than previously believed. However, details provided by the report indicate that China is still years — if not a decade — away from making chips using EUV lithography.
The machine can generate 13.5-nm EUV light using the same laser-produced plasma (LPP) method employed by ASML, which may demonstrate extensive reverse engineering of Western technology rather than the use of alternative domestic approaches. However, the tool is significantly larger than commercial systems available today, it cannot produce usable chips, and appears to struggle with other elements of EUV lithography, particularly ultra-precise optics supplied to ASML by Carl Zeiss. In fact, details about the system like light source power, optical subsystem maturity, and the state of critical mechanical components remain unclear.
While China expects first prototype EUV chips to emerge in 2028, Reuters's sources suggest 2030 is more realistic. Yet, the whole effort relies heavily on recruiting former ASML engineers and reverse engineering parts from existing EUV and DUV tools, which are not only hard to develop, but are extremely hard to make. Meanwhile, there is no word whether the current team responsible for disassembling and reassembling components can actually make an ultra-complex machine consisting of over 100,000 parts work flawlessly to produce semiconductors in high volumes.
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Anton Shilov Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
Gururu Makes sense, why reinvent the wheel? Flood Amazon with cheaper competitive GPUs and processors! Reply
das_stig So lets just say it, stolen IP, as no way did they do this clean room style, lets see when the first products made by the tech start appearing if ASML ask for an court orders to ban import and resale, if Trump still around, he may do it first ! Reply
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/china-may-have-reverse-engineered-euv-lithography-tool-in-covert-lab-report-claims-employees-given-fake-ids-to-avoid-secret-project-being-detected-prototypes-expected-in-2028#main
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