Germany Carl Zeiss, heart of Dutch ASML Lithography Equipment.

ZeEa5KPul said:

This is the country that went from its first atomic bomb to its first hydrogen bomb in 3 years (which took the US 11) - while it was still a backward peasant society with more than 50% illiteracy. I simply refuse to believe that given the enormous depth of engineering talent and experience in China today, the vast industrial supply chain, and a willingness to treat patents as recipe books, it would take a decade to make an EUV machine. That's bullshit, plain and simple.

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It took the rest of the world several decades to accomplish that.

I don't know if you ever worked with patents, but they are not exactly recipe books. They are written in a very general language, with plenty of critical details left out. Having access to them will not necessarily help you as much as you seem to think.. You will still have to do most of the hard work yourself.

Let's stop with attacking each other and concentrate on the Thread topic. I've had enough of people getting rubbed the wrong way due to phrasings and whatnot.
tidalwave does a great service to the thread by posting very technical documents and stuff. Instead of wondering about his ideology/political inclinations - we must be objective in appreciating the technical documents and information posted.
It's all for understanding and gauging China's progress in semiconductor fabrication. That's the mission.
Our vision is to have a stronger and resilient China.

Ofcourse, those who disagree with tidalwave can post even more technical documents and news regarding China's lithography technology.
We need more "wallclimbers" to bring in internal news from Chinese semiconductor industry.

Chish said:

The more he talks, the more I am not convinced. Sad

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I was pointing out doing EUV from scratch by China is not easy take many years or may not come through.

so you saying you not convinced that it should be easy?? What you trying to say.

EUV only uses reflective mirrors not lens due to lens made of fused silica which absorbs EUV light.
The mirror is about 40 layers of alternate Mo/Si and each layer is 6.8nm thick.
The surface of the mirror has to be very smooth , no more than 0.2nm RMS.. meaning the unevenness of the mirror is a few atoms thick.
0.2nm RMS means only allow 2 atoms difference.
Have to use ion beam to "sand" the layer to remove extra atoms.

That's why its super difficult to make mirror for EUV optics. All optics vendors in China i talked to have not even heard such things ,

Can we not "rotate" the Silicon wafer and do the lithography rather than using fast mechanized motions that put heavy requirements of precision?
@tidalwave

AndrewS said:

Huawei being banned from the latest EUV technology is not the end of Huawei.
There are still many growth areas where use of older nodes works out cheaper than designing for the latest EUV node.

There should also be other Chinese companies which still can use the latest EUV technology from Samsung or TSMC.

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That's exactly what US government wants.

Xsizor said:

Can we not "rotate" the Silicon wafer and do the lithography rather than using fast mechanized motions that put heavy requirements of precision?
@tidalwave

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that's the stepper technology. I haven't heard SMEE has trouble with that.

tidalwave said:

that's the stepper technology. I haven't heard SMEE has trouble with that.

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This is what i am trying to say. Pardon if its unfeasible.

@tidalwawe
Maybe try to talk to someone on Twitter, there are many Chinese ambassadors now on Twitter. If they don't listen about the importance of EUV technology, there is a possibility that someone might read it and opens their contacts.

tidalwave said:

That's exactly what US government wants.

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The US government (aka Trump) wanted China to capitulate and agree to whatever Trump wanted in the trade war.
The national security guys in the USA wanted Huawei to go bankrupt and stop supplying 4G/5G infrastructure.

Neither have gotten what they wanted.

For Huawei, the 4G/5G infrastructure side doesn't need the latest semiconductor process nodes.
It's a relatively small number of chips which have a reliable electricity supply, so older nodes work out better.

The smartphone side is not national security related, but it does benefit from access to the latest semiconductor process nodes which use less battery electricity.
That is what is being really affected with EUV and Entity List restrictions.

So Huawei is pivoting towards a 5G-enabled "internet of things" for example, which relies on simpler chips. and should be a much larger market than smartphones.