What simply occurred? China has lengthy sought to minimize its reliance on overseas chipmakers and deal with its home-grown choices, a part of the Made in China 2025 plan to replace its home manufacturing capabilities. But these ambitions might be scuppered by the US, which needs to ban the sale of lithography instruments produced by Netherlands-based ASML to the nation.
ASML, the world’s largest provider of lithography machines used within the chipmaking course of, is already prohibited from promoting its most superior excessive ultraviolet (EUV) lithography tools, which prices about $164 million per unit, to its Chinese clients because it can’t acquire an export license from the Dutch authorities on account of strain from the United States.
Bloomberg writes that the US authorities is now pushing ASML to additionally cease promoting its older deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography instruments to Chinese shoppers. Despite being a era previous, the know-how continues to be used to create chips present in telephones, autonomous automobiles, PCs, robots, and extra. The US needs to ban the sale of probably the most superior sort of DUV know-how, immersion lithography machines, to China. ASML is the primary participant on this discipline; it had a 95% market share when it got here to gross sales of immersion lithography techniques final yr.
As famous by The Reg, whereas DUV techniques are largely used for older manufacturing processes like 30nm, multi-patterning strategies can be utilized to make denser nodes. TSMC, for instance, makes use of DUV for the primary two generations of its 7nm nodes.
The US can also be making an attempt to strain Japanese corporations comparable to Nikon to cease promoting the identical DUV instruments to China, which has already seen a number of home corporations banned from shopping for superior chipmaking tools from US corporations.
If the US does get its means, ASML’s backside line might take a giant hit. Chinese chipmakers accounted for 14.7 p.c of ASML gross sales final yr. To offer you an thought of figures, SMIC, China’s largest chipmaker, plans to take a position $11 billion in rising its DUV capability by 2023.
“The dialogue is just not new. No selections have been made and we don’t wish to speculate or touch upon rumors,” an ASML spokeswoman mentioned.
Last month, Chen Wenling, chief economist on the government-run China Center for International Economic Exchanges, referred to as for China to grab Taiwan’s TSMC “if the US and the West impose damaging sanctions on China like sanctions in opposition to Russia.”