There is little ASML can do, even if they wanted to, their light sources for DUV machines come from the US (Cymer).
The article is wrong then. It has nothing to do with the leadership there. As if US vassals have any saying in this. At best they can delay.
I remember hearing that Russia would not be able to keep Western aircraft running for a month with the sanctions and that they would have to start cannibalizing aircraft. It has been over two years and no such thing happened.
In other words if the tools have even a single screw made in the US they won't allow them to be exported. This is nothing new.
It would eventually happen regardless of who is the head of the government.
What is important are the components providers like RS LASER, Duvi Photoresist, lens and optics, U-precision like their work bench. There are many potential competitors cause SMEE is an integrator, Huawei and CETC can do the job and may have been doing so. Plus NO news is good news, we may well be surprise that they have produce at least 24 units of SSA800A as of AUGUST this year, 3 machine per month. My evidence are based as of late 2023 when they had delivered at least 2 machine in DECEMBER alone.
I tend to disagree regarding DUVi part , there are 2 Local providers that I can think of, one is RS LASER and the other one is CIOMP, so China had the wherewithal to replace the needed components to maintain their ASML DUVI machine.
That is going to happen sooner than later, there are many other litho companies entering the space, specially in the packaging and power market, that will put pressure in SMEE to focus more in front end lithography machines and that is really bad news for ASML because the Chinese government could push for the use of SMEE machines.
That what you can see, the internet only allows to scan the surface but things in China go deeper, I am pretty sure that SMEE has advance immersion machines already running and patterning wafers, their recent announce give an insight, particularly the wording of Holistic metrology that means that this tool is mean to work in a close loop with the immersion scanner, the coating developing tool, AEI and ADI metrology tools, DJEL EBI tools.
I understand the rumor mills as the SMEE is under testing and has been “delivered” but for an article published in 2023 that claims it would be delivered by year-end, it feels quite dated given we are now nearing September 2024
Again wrong.
Or maybe they will announce it on OCT 1 the 75th anniversary of PROC.