Why China is Likely Not the Threat They Appear

Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog gathers a variety of sources to report on Chinese efforts to reverse engineer high-end chip lithography machines.

Semiconductors are hard. Not only do you have to exactly machine the thousands of painstakingly precise parts in the equipment itself, you need to possess the deep institutional knowledge necessary necessary to tweak the thousands of differing process parameters for different types of chips. Steppers, the lithography machines that actually project the patterns necessary to make each layer of the chip, are at the very top of the mountain in terms of technological complexity, and ASML dominates the stepper market. If it was easy to build steppers, Applied Materials, LAM, or Tokyo Electron would have come out with their own steppers long ago, and they haven’t.

But China would love to get their hands on that technology, which is why they tried to disassemble and backward engineering an ASML DUV stepper and ended up ruining it in the process.

A Chinese firm reportedly has sought technical support from ASML, the world’s largest chipmaking equipment supplier, after it failed to reassemble a deep-ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machine following an internal teardown for alleged reverse engineering.