Chiny nie potrzebują Europy. Rozwój i tak będzie trwał

China doesn't need Europe. Development will continue anyway

Xi Jinping gave a clear sign to the world that China can cope without access to Western machines. However, the reality may be more brutal, at least initially.

We have many different semiconductor manufacturers on the market, and the largest and most modern companies are TSMC (Taiwan), Samsung (South Korea) and Intel (USA). However, all of them use advanced EUV machines from one manufacturer – ASMLwhich comes from Europe.

China is trying to put a good face on a bad game

However, the Americans managed to convince the Dutch to impose sanctions on the Chinese some time ago “export controls”. In other words cutting off China from ASML machines. All this in order to limit the possibilities on the market of AI systems that could be used for military purposes.

As reported by the Associated Press, Xi Jinping and Mark Rutte they met officially on this matter. It was then that the Secretary General of the Communist Party of China reportedly told the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of the Netherlands that “attempts to limit China's access to technology will not stop our country's development”.

In fact, this is a strong blow to Chinese companies such as SMIC Whether YMTC. Of course, the Chinese already have a certain pool of EUV machines, but they are unable to purchase more limits their production capacity and significantly slows down the development of new lithography. Not to mention possible failures in the future.

China doesn't need Europe.  Development will continue anyway

China badly needs indigenous lithography equipment and some progress is being made. You can mention, for example SMEE (Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment), which introduced its first supporting equipment last year 28nm. However, it is not clear whether the Chinese can produce such machines in large quantities. Additionally, this is for now already very outdated technology.

ASML machines allow work in 14 nm and newer lithography. TSMC offers a 7 and 4 nm production process based on them. It is true that the cooperation between SMIC and Huawei resulted in 7 nm chips for smartphones, and the companies announced work on chips in 5 nm, but all this is based on the already existing DUV equipment from the Dutch.

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