China’s lithography gains a glass half full, not half empty – Asia Times

As Beijing tries to become more self-sufficient in high-end chip-making products, China’s most just disclosed progress in semiconductor printing technology has received widespread suspicion. However, it makes more sense to observe China’s progress than to let competitors be complacent about how much it has to go in the critical tech field.

On semiconductor production lines, printing equipment is used to move circuit styles from the photomask (template ) to the chip. China has overcome this technical obstacle in order to establish a self-sufficient semiconductor manufacturing sector that is immune to US-led restrictions.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology ( MIIT ) announced earlier this month that it wanted Chinese chip makers to put two domestically produced lithography systems on a list of equipment.

One is a krypton fluoride ( KrF ) scanner capable of producing integrated circuits ( ICs ) with 130 nanometer ( nm ) design rules. A 65nm argon fluoride ( ArF ) scanner can produce chips in addition to the other. Details on throughput, alignment accuracy and the name of the manufacturer ( s ) were not provided.

65nm is a long way from the 28nm that China has recently targeted, and it is even further away from the 5nm it has allegedly reached using imported printing technology.

KrF and ArF refer to excimer laser light solutions with frequencies of 248nm and 193nm, both. KrF and ArF scanners are the two deep ultra-violet ( DUV) lithography systems that preceded the leading-edge extreme ultra-violet ( EUV) systems monopolized by ASML of the Netherlands. The frequency of EUV light is 13 nm.

Chinese semiconductor printing methods appear to be able to compete with older models from ASML, Nikon, and Canon. In ascending order of modern style, Canon, Nikon and ASML make most of the world’s Circuit printing techniques, with ASML extensively in the global market share result.

Canon supplies i-line and KrF printing systems to makers of less-advanced reasoning and storage chips, devices used in communications technology, power semiconductors used in electric vehicles and different applications, and Circuit presentation. The term i-line refers to a previous-generation technology that uses 365nm ultraviolet ( UV) light from mercury vapor lamps.

In the 1970s and 1990s, Canon released its first silicon printing system in Japan, and it quickly established itself in the markets for the i-line and KrF systems. Nonetheless, it never attempted EUV and failed to move to ArF at the turn of the century. Canon is currently developing a completely new systems called nanoimprint printing, which has not yet been made available for mass production.

The Japanese Ministry of International Trade in Industry ( MITI ) established the VLSI Technology Research Association (VLSI Labs ) in 1976 to create technology that could compete with the US semiconductor equipment market. Nikon was given the task of creating a system that could reduce the size of Circuit designs by ten.

Nikon, which like its colleague camera-maker Canon could render high-quality lenses but which also had detailed high-speed level positioning technology, produced a device that, in Nikon’s words, “was precise enough to reach a tennis ball with an arrow on the top of Mt Fuji all the way from Tokyo”.

The device was a step-and-repeat IC lithography system – a” stepper”, which stepped across the wafer one chip at a time, enabling higher resolution than the mask aligners they replaced.

Aligners, which use a mask that covers the entire surface of the wafer, were faster than the first steppers, but they were unable to keep up with Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years.

Nikon delivered a prototype in 1978 and shipped its first stepper for commercial use in 1980, a machine with one micrometer ( one micron, or 1, 000nm ) resolution and highly accurate alignment. In 1982, the first shipment to the US was made. By the end of the 1980s, mask aligners and the American companies that made them, Perkin-Elmer and GCA, had been largely displaced by Japanese steppers.

In the 1990s, steppers were replaced by step-and-scan systems– scanners, which expose only part of the mask as they move. A smaller lens was created as a result, which reduced both aberrations and cost while boosting resolution.

The history of Nikon’s product introduction shows the rate of progress:

An ArF immersion scanner was created by Nikon in 2005 for mass production at 55 nm, with the first unit arriving in January 2006. In immersion lithography, the gap between the lens and the wafer is filled with water, which has a higher refractive index than air ( i .e., higher than 1.0), allowing for the creation of smaller features on the wafer. This method was also employed in the creation of 45 nm devices.

The most recent Nikon ArF immersion scanner’s resolution was 38 nm, which is as low as it goes according to the published specs. By 2012, that is down to. This machine had the ability to generate double-patterned ICs at 22 nm.

By 2024, Nikon was talking about meeting 5nm requirements with multiple patterning. Lam Research, a US manufacturer of semiconductor etching equipment, explains multiple patterning as follows:

” For decades, one of the major trends in electronics has been miniaturization, which has helped pack in more functionality, extend battery life, and lower production costs per chip. Up until recently, the semiconductor industry was able to scale lithography capabilities to shrink integrated circuit ( IC ) feature dimensions in response to consumer demands for smaller, more powerful products.

Although this method has been successfully employed for many years, modern, more advanced chip designs have smaller and denser features that necessitate going beyond the conventional lithography wavelength’s. Advanced patterning techniques are used to overlay multiple patterns of larger dimensions on these chips to achieve smaller and/or more tightly packed features. The most fundamental pattern pattern used is double patterning, which increases feature density by twofold.

Multiple patterning explains how Chinese semiconductor manufacturers can use ArF immersion systems purchased from Nikon or, more likely, ASML to create chips at the 7nm or even the 5nm process node, for example, the processors for the newest Huawei smartphones. The effective limiting for DUV lithography for commercial use is 5 nm.

ASML was founded in 1984. It played catch-up for 20 years, but in 2003 it released the first TWINSCAN ArF immersion scanner, a dual-stage system that exposed one wafer while the next wafer was being measured and aligned to achieve higher throughput and accuracy.

In terms of the value of systems sold, ASML overtook Canon and Nikon and then took an unsurmountable lead, with its market share for IC lithography increasing from less than 30 % in 2001 to more than 80 % in 2023.

In 2010, ASML shipped the first EUV scanner. By 2016, it was shipping batches of high-volume production machines. EUV lithography currently permits mass production at 3 nm, with the anticipated arrival of 2 nm soon and 1 nm by the tenth century.

ASML’s market dominance of the IC lithography market’s high end is apparent in its most recent sales figures: In the three months to June 2024, ASML sold eight EUV, 32 ArF immersion, 11 ArF dry, 33 KrF and 16 i-line lithography systems.

Nikon, which sold only four i-line systems in the three months to June due to the timing of deliveries, expects to sell five ArF immersion, six ArF dry, two KrF and 22 i-line systems in the year to March 2025– i. e., fewer ArF and KrF machines in a year than ASML shipped last quarter.

In the three months to June, Canon sold 10 KrF and 50 i-line systems, and it anticipates selling 54 KrF and 190 i-line systems in the year to December. In mature technologies, Canon is a high-quality, high-volume competitor for the Chinese, a challenging benchmark that is not subject to sanctions.

SMEE ( Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Co) is China’s leading producer of IC lithography equipment. Founded in 2002, SMEE has developed lithography systems for front-end IC manufacturing and back-end IC packaging, power semiconductors, LEDs ( light-emitting diodes ), MEMS ( micro electro-mechanical systems ) and FPDs ( flat panel displays ).

FPD lithography equipment is primarily produced by Nikon and Canon, which are the main manufacturers of which ASML does n’t produce and which are not regulated by the US.

SMEE makes ArF scanners capable of producing ICs with 280nm, 110nm, 90nm and now, probably, 65nm design rules – which means that SMEE is probably the manufacturer of the lithography systems currently being promoted by China’s MIIT.

Since at least 2020, SMEE has been working on immersion lithography. However, it is premature to say whether a system that can produce ICs at the 28nm process node is either nearing completion or has been successfully developed.

In April of this year, reports indicated that another Chinese company, Naura Technology, had launched a lithography R&amp, D project using a technology called self-aligning quadruple patterning, but this has not been confirmed. According to DigiTimes, Nikon is” closely monitoring Naura, which produces etching and deposition equipment capable of 28nm production.

It’s possible that Naura is also developing the technology, but SMEE has probably found 28nm-capable lithography systems to be very challenging to produce. There is no way they would be able to accomplish it, and smaller resolutions almost certainly will follow. SMEE is reportedly working on EUV.

Now that the US has pressured the Netherlands to stop providing services to Chinese customers, the Chinese are feeling more urgent.

Although how successful this new sanction will be, how effective it will be will remain to be seen, it gives the Chinese an additional incentive to make more efforts to replace imported equipment.

Follow this writer on&nbsp, X: @ScottFo83517667