IDK about lithography much but I know many labs both academic and corporate who made R&D scale or even pilot scale deposition and metrology equipment from standard components, and they work very well. There's even component companies who sell their own branded equipment made from their own off-the-shelf parts.
Here bro I take the contrarian view, to fast track the development , Huawei (being sanction anyway) may have taken the task of developing future Iteration (SSA900 22NM DUVL) while at the same time verifying and establishing the production process of 14nm domestic line, remember ICRD is the one assisting Huawei in her Fabrication effort. My conclusion is base on @olalavn post about Hisilicon and SMEE JV on 7nm Litho, cobble with @WTAN post of a possible 7nm domestic line late next year. The successful verification and mass production process of 14nm as shown by the marketing effort of Huawei about the possible Return of The King in 2023.
I agree. if Huawei did make their own instrument, it is done by buying the SMEE schematics with a complete BoM. I am not an expert on lithography but based on what I learned and some more thoughts, DUV lithography isn't like deposition where you can make monkey model pilot scale instruments from standard parts.This would be already a huge milestone. Even with low yield and low capacity,
That's for dead sure! Equipment lifetime spans many years and decades (and US administrations), you cannot buy now withouth considering the future.
SMIC core R&D team is from Taiwan, and maybe they have their mentality and habits. Eventually someone decided that SMIC needed a little "push" for localization
Well if it is true, it means Huawei took much more than talent from SMEE. The only way to move faster is to take full SMEE litho machine design and blueprints and continue from there. Anyhow this rumor seems to me a bit odd because it would be a duplication and waste of precious and scarce resources. It would meake more sense for a team from Huawei to go to SMEE and join a SMEE project team to work on a dedicated machine customization for Huawei.
Sir sorry I don't BUT we can deduced from the info of @Oldschool and @foofy maybe the 23 units delivered in the first half of the year are mostly 2050i.
A 40,000 wafer per month 14nm fab need 15 DUV. One fifth or 3 units are 2050i. The rest are low end DUV.
Parallelization is not always wasteful because there are such things as bottlenecks in the development process, and widening the surface area of efforts can also translate to broadening odds of success or maximizing process learning. These are the same tradeoffs for any decision involving centralization/decentralization variables.
No offense but is there some evidence for a 100% domestic line. That’s a major development if true.