hvpc was not nearly as bad as predicting 20+ years.
Basically he says that his timeline comes from the need to run billions of product wafers and eating the water scrap costs, which would cost $1 trillion. Even if you had the money, how fast could you realistically run the wafers and iterate?
Second, he says a lithography prototype is worthless without matching tools. For example, EUV requires pellicle-free handling, vacuum-compatible storage, and defects inspection tools that are drastically different from DUV. How did these tools get created? He says it took decades of experience in KrF, ArF, wet and dry tools to create these.
And even at the DUV level, if you make a lithography machine that is not compatible with the other tooling in the fab, it can't be used. For example, Nikon is stuck at a 10% market share for its mature node lithography machines because they are not compatible with ASML tooling that most fabs already have installed. ASML's moat includes an ecosystem advantage at this point.
Also, he says SMEE's 28nm lithography tool isn't in use for volume production because it needs an immersion scanner for the "other layers", since 28nm needs immersion lithography for the smallest layers. And if you don't have immersion lithography technology, you can't do 28m.
Essentially, he points out that lithography development is an iterative process and you can't just magically skip steps. Then he asks at what step China currently is. KrF? ArF? I-line? You need the answers to these questions and due to opacity, we don't have them.
But I've never seen any report of any Chinese lithography machine used in volume production for commercial ends anywhere; not even the most primitive. He claims Huawei, for instance, has never even made a broadband stepper, which is 1980s/1990s technology. And no one has been able to refute him. And why would it? Huawei is a network gear and mobile phone company, not a lithography company. Because it has money and is a hardware company? That means little. By that standard, Boeing and Lenovo should be making lithography machines because they are hardware companies with deep pockets. There is no reason to think Huawei would have the background, experience or talent to do lithography. At the end of the day, if you want confidence in Chinese lithography, China is going to have to have the confidence to publicly announce that it has achieved so-and-so lithography process fully domestically sourced, and put it into volume production for some product that a member of the public can personally buy and physically hold and see working in their own hands. Otherwise it's going to be all smoke and mirrors. It's been over 5 years now of the chip war and and we're still at the smoke and mirrors stage.
That's why a better path for China might just be to go all out on quantum; that is a relatively new technology where there are not such big moats and can allow China to leapfrog the U.S. with sufficient effort. Rather than trying to copy the past in a Sisyphean effort that will only end up with them still behind.
