China’s first avant -garde lithography machine is not the biggest US problem. They will be the other two that are on their way

The semiconductor industry is strategic for great powers. Without exception. Its technological development is closely linked to its ability to manufacture or acquire avant -garde chips, hence the US and its allies are deploying Successive packages of sanctions They pursue stop the technical progress of China. In this situation the country of Xi Jinping only has one option: invest in its chips industry for become independent of foreign technologies. And he is doing it.

Two of its largest investments They arrived in 2014 and 2019before the technological war of which we are witnessing was unleashed. In 2014, the Chinese government injected about 19,000 million dollars into its chip industry, and in 2019 this figure increased to touching 27.5 billion dollars. However, these investments pale in front of China at the end of 2023. And it is that just two years ago the government approved An investment of 41,000 million dollars expressly dedicated to manufacturers of lithography equipment.

The achievements are beginning to arrive. As we explain yesterdayPulin Technology, one of the many Chinese photolithography machines, has sent one of its clients its first avant -garde team using nano -impression lithography technology (it is known as NIL by its denomination in English Nanoimprint Lithography). On paper this machine will initially produce 5 nm chips, and in the future You can reach the 2 nm. However, this is not all. China has at least two other extraordinarily ambitious and promising projects.

Nil lithography is already ready. And the UVE photolithography is on its way

NIL lithography is not entirely comparable to the extreme ultraviolet photolithography (UVE) implemented by the Dutch company ASML in its most advanced machines. Its operating strategy is very lowered by the cost of these equipment, but also entails the execution of several sequential processes that make it slower than UVE and UVP lithography. For this reason, the Pulin team is not the end of the road to China. And all probability during the next months will see other photolithography solutions developed by Chinese companies.

In the middle of last March several Asian media collected a photograph taken at the Huawei Research Center in Dongguan, in the province of Canton, in which it appeared The prototype of a UVE lithography team Designed and manufactured entirely in China. Presumably this machine is similar to those produced by ASML, which invites us to anticipate that for 2026 the country led by Xi Jinping will have the ability to produce on a large scale advanced chips using this technology. However, China’s plans do not end here.

And it is that the Chinese Academy of Sciences is finishing the one that is undoubtedly the most ambitious project of those who are developing the Chinese semiconductor industry. According to Dr. Kiman expert in the manufacture of integrated circuits who has worked in Samsung and who currently investigates for TSMC in the US, China is about to reach a “Deepseek” in the field of integrated circuit industry. This simply means that it is preparing to reach a disruption that has the potential to place this Asian country at the same height as the US, Taiwan or South Korea.

However, China’s strategy to produce avant -garde chips is very different from what their rivals have used until now. Each of ASML UVE machines incorporates its own ultraviolet light source, but the Chinese Academy of Sciences seeks to generate this important radiation to produce advanced chips using a syncrotronwhich is nothing other than a circular particle accelerator that is used to analyze atomic level the properties of matter, such as various types of materials, or even proteins. It’s called heps (High Energy Photon Source or high -energy photons source), it is in Beijing and we can see it in the cover photography of this article.

An important note before moving forward: the ultraviolet light (UV) is responsible for transferring the geometric pattern that contains the design of the chips to the Silicon wafer. This means, in broad strokes, that the UVE light has the ability to make possible the manufacture of integrated circuits with a greater resolution than the deep ultraviolet light (UVP) that use the previous generation lithography machines that China has in their hands. And a greater resolution in practice implies that it is possible to produce semiconductors with more transistors, and, therefore, more sophisticated and powerful.

A priori we can think that a particle accelerator has nothing to do with the manufacture of integrated circuits, but we would be overlooking something very important: the Heps syncotron has the ability to produce high power UVE light. In fact, it is a source designed to generate a large amount of radiation.

China’s plan is to place several semiconductor manufacturing plants around the particle accelerator to which the syncotron will deliver the UVE light in the same way that a power plant delivers electricity to its customers. That simple. The date on which China plans to start this megaphabric avant -garde semiconductor, but, as we can see in the photograph, is already very advanced, so we can take it for granted, will not be leaked soon.

Image | Dr. Kim

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