Chinese semiconductor thread II
- Thread starter vincent
- Start date
More domestic companies developing domestic lithography machine maintenance tools.
this is another interesting thing to watch. Photoresist and what happens to it this year.
there is at least rumor of Japan cutting off high end photoresist export to China. Although I can't verify this on the customs website, so I'm not sure how the people that posted it identified it (since the general photoresist code is no longer available and the parent category shows no discernible drop).
It would be pretty disappointing if they back out of the escalation and have not yet put the pieces together to fill the missing gaps in photoresist supply chain.
There are multiple companies already supplying photoresist from ArF immersion. ArF dry, KrF, Iline, PCB, Ebeam. They are already fighting each other to fill the gaps. The pressure of being cut off will likely accelerate the adoption by fabs of domestic resist chemicals.
But I have my doubts because Japanese companies are adverse to ceding market share they probably put pressure to the government to avoid losing market share. Either way Chinese companies need to adopting domestic materials fast, the US is already looking to put controls on these chemicals and different from the Japanese government, they have the will to do it using the de-minimis rule.
I would be pretty disappointing if Japan backs out of killing their own photoresist companies lol