Right after weeks of speculation, the US finally confident the Netherlands and Japan on January 27 to impose harder sanctions on China’s semiconductor industry, an agreement that reports stated the three sides arrived at after two days of talks in Washington.
But then the particular obfuscation began, around officials refusing in order to elaborate on the curves of the announced prohibit agreement. “This is such a sensitive topic which the Dutch government chooses to communicate vigilantly, and that means that we only communicate in a very limited way, ” said Netherlands Leading Minister Mark Rutte.
Japan’s Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Yasutoshi Nishimura stated he “would want to refrain from commenting on diplomatic negotiations. ” People “familiar with all the situation” reportedly declared that implementation of the contract could take several months.
Yet implementation of exactly what? The Wall Street Journal documented that ASML from the Netherlands and Nikon of Japan would stop exporting “at least some immersion lithography machines” to China.
Immersion lithography means DUV (deep ultra-violet) ArF (argon fluoride) laserlight lithography systems in which the space between the final lens and the surface area of the silicon wafer is filled with filtered water.
Due to the fact purified water includes a refractive index of just one. 44 (compared with 1 . 0 regarding air), this boosts the resolution of the optical technologies, facilitating the creation of smaller chip feature sizes. Presently, ASML and Nikon are the only businesses able to mass-produce these semiconductor-making machines.
Stopping shipments associated with ArF immersion lithography systems would allow it to be difficult for Tiongkok to add new manufacturing capacity at or even below the 40-nanometer node – i. e., for the almost all semiconductor production by value – plus particularly at the 28nm and smaller nodes now used to generate integrated circuits with regard to automotive, the Internet of Things, consumer electronics, cell phones, high-speed networking and computer applications.
The practical restrict of DUV will be 7nm. The leading-edge 5nm and 3nm processes now within production at Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung, and the 2nm processes they will both have under development, rely on EUV (extreme ultra-violet) lithography techniques. These are made just by ASML plus, at the request of the US government, not really exported to China.
The semiconductor industry was amazed and US federal government officials were stunned when it was reported last summer that will China’s leading semiconductor foundry, SMIC, acquired managed to produce potato chips using 7nm process technology . Almost certainly, experts say, this was accomplished by using ASML or even Nikon equipment.
How many immersion lithography systems China has purchased from ASML and Nikon can be unclear, but analysts’ estimates range from “many” to “dozens. ”
Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis reviews that SMIC, China’s leading foundry, “could achieve a capacity associated with well over 100, 000 wafers a month associated with 7nm foundry capability with their existing DUV tools alone. This really is higher than Samsung plus Intel’s advanced node (< =7nm) foundry capacity, combined. ”
“If all of the DUV tools at various Chinese nationals such as HuaHong, Shanghai Huali, YMTC, CXMT, GTA Semi, Nexchip, Yandong, Nexperia, CRYSTAL REPORTS Micro, Sien, Fulsemi, SEMC, NSEMI had been reappropriated by SMIC, the 7nm capability they could build would far exceed those of even TSMC’s 7nm, ” Patel claims.
John Kirby, the White House national security speaker, told the media that talks between your US, Netherlands plus Japan would concentrate on areas “important to all three of us…. certainly the security and safety of emerging technologies is going to be on that will agenda. ”
But DUV lithography is not an emerging technology – except in the sense that the understanding is growing among US policymakers which the Chinese already have it and are developing the capacity to make it indigenously.
China’s Shanghai Micro Electronics Tools Co (SMEE) has reportedly developed lithography equipment that works right down to 14nm. Yields is very much low and mass production is not however feasible, but the technologies is reportedly enhancing with time and encounter.
To the degree that ASML plus Nikon are forced in order to abandon the Chinese lithography market, SMIC will have both a greater incentive and a better opportunity to build a large-scale competitive business.
This is suddenly essential now that the US provides reportedly stopped granting licenses for that export of 4-G smartphone chips as well as other previous-generation devices in order to Huawei. For the time being, Huawei should be able to buy them through MediaTek and other non-American sources, but US officials will no doubt attempt to put pressure with them as well.
China’s Communist Party-run mouthpiece Global Times calls the latest tech ban a “paranoid, last-ditch move. ”
“Targeting Huawei, a representative of China’s rising high-tech business, is not a new advancement, ” writes Global Times, “as the tech giant had been added to the US trade blacklist four years back. But what is ironic, according to observers, is the fact that after years of ‘whack-a-mole’ restrictions on a raft of Chinese tech firms, the Biden administration had to easily jump back to the original target. ”
Investors, meanwhile, tend not to seem overly concerned by the new multilateral sanctions. ASML plus Nikon’s stock costs declined on the news, yet have already bounced back, as have the costs of Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron.
The latter 2 companies, the largest United states and Japanese makers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, would also lose sales if lithography equipment exports to China had been barred.
Japan semiconductor production machines makers say they have not yet been contacted by government officials about any new restrictions on exports to China. But only a 7 days has passed since the announcement and each Nikon and Tokyo Electron are in their own quiet periods prior to the release of December quarter results on February 9.
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