That's a fantastic piece of news. If SMIC manage to get hold of the EUV litho machine hopefully they will catch up with TSMC at 3nm!
Chinese semiconductor industry
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With the EU showing that it's willing to be independent in some of its foreign policy as demonstrated by the recent trade deal as well as recently committing $145 bn to the semi conductor industry, is there a chance that ASML will sell EUV to SMIC despite US objections?
No.
Hi jshw31,
ASML is using it's LPP light source from CYMER of the US. and also DARPA co funded their EUVL development together with TSMC.
Now that the US has gone hard core with export restrictions, China should go all out with a hacking campaign against ASML's supply chain. The SolarWinds hack was stunningly successful.
Hi gadgetcool5,
No need, All domestic parts for an EUVL had been successfully develop except for for the light source. Maybe next year we will be surprise by SMEE
.In theory there is a potential bargain to be done. The EU wants to build an advanced fab so SMIC could license its advanced process, i.e. 3nm when fully developed, to the EU in exchange of ASML EUV tool. I don't know if that will happen as it is mainly a political issue not a commercial one.
As pointed out earlier, this is not an ASML issue. If ASML cannot abide by their contractual agreements with their supply chain (e.g. CYMER), ASML will not be able to produce (and sell) anything to anyone. ASML is caught in the middle.
This whole EUV episode is a replay of the commercial satellite U.S.-content episode in the 1990's. U.S. gave away that business, then telecom, now the Intel x86 ISA/CPU is eroding fast, next is EDA, followed by the entire semiconductor sector. What a pity. To us East Coast geeks, Holmdel/Summit/Murray Hill (and Yorktown Heights) used to be our Nerdvana...
The bulk of ASML EUV technology is Dutch/German and Cymer is a fully owned subsidiary of ASML. The share US technology content in the ASML EUV litho machine is less then 25% therefore the US ban on SMIC technically does not apply to this tool. The reason why ASML have not been able to ship the machine to SMIC has nothing to do with the US blacklist. The Dutch goverment is not issuing an export license for this particular sale as it was under immense pressure from the Trump administration. From what I read Pompeo hilmself raised the issue to the Dutch PM.
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