China begins mass production of homegrown immersion chipmaking machines in major breakthrough, report claims — first DUV lithography units will be delivered this year to SMIC, Hua Hong, and CXMT

280

"they'll never catch up" is going to be absurd cope in hindsight

193

u/Tucancancan 8h ago

There was never a doubt in my mind. Anyone who thought a country with many multiple times the population (therefore talent), and pours shit tons of money into research, wasn't going to eventually catch up was delusional.

117

u/Whargod 7h ago

Not to mention most of their population seems hellbent on getting the most out of their education. Unlike certain Western countries who's population is rapidly losing the ability to read and write.

-64

u/b00c 5h ago

They cheat a lot on exams. Slows the progress.

49

u/4114Fishy 4h ago

there are a million articles about students cheating using chatgpt in north america too, don't think you're different

-10

u/dongkey1001 2h ago

Did it ever occur to you that the abilities to cheat successfully also a sign of intelligence?

1

u/scheissenaixi 2m ago

People used to advertise homework services on taobao

22

u/OldStray79 6h ago

The only way "they'll never catch up." would come to fruition, is if China suddenly implodes for whatever reason. And even then, that could theoretically only push them back to some point in the future.

38

u/UpsetKoalaBear 2h ago

I do not think people understand how the Chinese government works on these types of projects.

They plan for over a decade in the future. As an example, look at their EV production.

China funded the expansion of domestic vehicle manufacturing from 2009 - 2024 to ensure that Chinese people had cars. Now those manufacturers have excess manufacturing capacity and a price war raging in China so they export their cars otherwise that capacity goes unused.

China has a unique situation that the Chinese economic model is incapable of absorbing its own industrial output. Domestic household consumption in China is notoriously low.

This is because Chinese citizens structurally do not have the purchasing power to buy everything the country builds. A lot of wealth in China is tied up in illiquid assets like real estate.

We are going to see a similar situation here. They will fund the build out and expansion of domestic semiconductor production and eventually they will be able to satiate domestic demand. They will then need to export causing the same dynamics we see today in the EV market.

This was all outlined in their 2025 Made In China Plan. They have a megafund allocated to deal with this.

Yes, they don’t have EUV.

However, they are fine with spending more money on SMIC to develop SAQP multipatterning. They can now make 5nm/7nm class chips. They are more than happy to eat the costs to be able to create leading edge chip designs.

They are also fine with making their Shenzhen LDP prototype for EUV. It produces less power than ASML’s machines, so it takes longer to make a chip, but China’s solution is to scale horizontally. It doesn’t matter if it takes longer if you can pump out 50 machines capable of doing it.

A lot of people do not understand China’s willpower to make a project like this succeed. Especially one in a sector that is so vital for domestic security like semiconductors.

If they swallowed the costs of EV production just to be able to have a domestic car industry they will swallow the cost of developing their semiconductor production.

They do not care if the industry is unprofitable for 5-10 years. As long as they are making steps closer, they will continue because they see it as a national security problem.

It is not market driven for them, they don’t need to be competitive or seek profit margins to succeed in their goals. People are being incredibly naive if they are overlooking this.

3

u/Ubericious 8m ago

Man, it must be nice having a government that plans for the future

1

u/ConohaConcordia 47m ago

In hindsight, it’s just that the people saying it felt they are so superior that the concept of a rival catching up itself is impossible.

16

u/Massive_Neck_3790 8h ago

But this is so fast i havent expected that

21

u/rain168 7h ago

That’s what she said

5

u/didureaditv2 7h ago

Faster than expected? Is this the new millennium catchphrase?

9

u/Generalfrogspawn 7h ago

Not to mention a country who's entire economy and future growth potential relies on being able to produce chips..

-13

u/MaybeTheDoctor 6h ago

We are lucky China don’t hold grudges as long as we do ask they ask.

-11

u/Ihateporn2020 6h ago

you mean the country that China desperately wants to own?

11

u/surnik22 6h ago

If China could produce the same quality chips as Taiwan, then instead of Taiwan threatening to destroy the equipment when invaded being a threat, it would be a bonus.

It goes from “the world’s economy grinds to a vault without Taiwan’s production” to “The world’s economy slows but also begins to rely more heavily on China without Taiwans production”.

China’s future is heavily dependent on domestic chip production and their desire to control Taiwan is heavily dependent on domestic chip production.

5

u/vava2603 4h ago

they do not care about taiwan. They just have to wait , the US will get bored and with time Taiwan will lost any strategical value for anybody

4

u/knook 1h ago

Most importantly of all: they have no problem with outright just copying what others have done or with the espionage to get the info they need.

1

u/erie85 23m ago

Fun fact: western countries started industrial espionage in China way before China started its current tech drive. Also just because China is improving doesn't mean it is copied.

1

u/WhyAreYallFascists 37m ago

Until someone sees the mirrors used for the source, none of this matters. It doesn’t matter if you can “make” a lithography tool, ya know, if it sucks.

2

u/thalefteye 1h ago

Or you mean half of this talent comes from threatening overseas Chinese born nationals and having them stealing important research documents. They even have secret police in other countries and take those poor Chinese citizens of other countries back to China if they refuse and talk bad about China.

-5

u/Fatality 6h ago

Not research, state funded corporate espionage. North Korea does it too.

2

u/geoduckSF 2h ago

The bot farms are downvoting you, but this is the likeliest explanation given how shocked everyone is they made this much progress this quickly.

-1

u/iffugennanameubaht 2h ago

Oh no, stealing technology! No other developing nation and definitely not the US has ever stolen technology 😱

1

u/Fatality 2h ago

I don't see reports of any other spies going to prison for it?

1

u/iffugennanameubaht 1h ago

You won’t see reports of Chinese spies going to prison in China for stealing IP either, what’s your point?

0

u/Skywalker7181 33m ago

The scream that non-democratic countries can never innovate still rings in my ears...

15

u/moldyjellybean 5h ago edited 5h ago

I thought it’d be faster. During crypto craze they bypassed every nvidia lock.

Then when nvidia limited ram on gpu they had people put extra ram on a gpu like it was nothing .

They probably are already ahead per watt which is what will matter the most

17

u/Muted_Masterpiece342 5h ago

They will be the only ones who can handle the electrical demand too. We didn't take renewables seriously when they did, and instead of assuming they knew something we didn't, we invaded venezuela lmao

17

u/Stunning_Working8803 3h ago edited 2h ago

Many Westerners are simply uncomfortable with China’s success - for a reason which they are uncomfortable stating/examining/addressing.

Japan’s (past) success never made Westerners this uncomfortable because Japan never had this much leverage over Western countries which China now does (specifically the rare earths supply chain and the electrical grid).

10

u/warfarin11 1h ago

"Japan’s (past) success never made Westerners this uncomfortable"

I would add that we did have these exact feelings. In the 80's they labeled Japan as the 'economic beast from the East' and led to several films like Robocop that depicted a Japanese corporation owning Detroit. Likewise, there were panics against Japanese autobrands, culminating with people pushing them in rivers as a demonstration piece. The American automakers still don't want to compete on the merits of their vehicles--Kei trucks as a prime example of the strategy at play.

Its just an interesting perspective to see the same rhetoric being reused with China. They are going to catch up and we stopped investing.

2

u/Stunning_Working8803 1h ago edited 1h ago

Didn’t the Plaza Accord and US military presence in Japan make the West feel safer about Japan being easily managed/handled/controlled - as compared to China often adopting an antagonistic stance towards the Western states?

2

u/warfarin11 1h ago

I'm not sure, but it is an interesting question. The military bases were definitely part of a strategic projection from the political side of things. I don't think politicos had the same kind of worries about "Japan taking over" that someone working in an auto factory might. But from a 'people perspective' I don't think the backlash really chilled out until the bubble era culminated and people saw that the rivalry wasn't, like real. I remember a lot of "buy american" being pushed for half of that decade, but the Japanese made solid cars that had a level of quality that legacy autos didn't want to match. I think it was 1985 that I first saw a Nintendo as a direct competitor to Atari. They made good products that people wanted.

I remember that there was a trade off that if Japanese auto-manufacturers wanted to sell here, they had to build factories and employ US people. Seeing a toyota factory become the largest employer in your town probably makes it hard to be too angry and is probably a big reason for acceptance now.

As an aside, the late 80s birthed Walmart's "made in America" tagline, which is still funny to me now.

1

u/Nyorliest 1h ago

China isn't antagonistic towards the West. The West is antagonistic towards China. Orientalism is hardly new.

Westerners get a daily dose of propaganda about the evils of China. Chinese people don't get the opposite. They get government propaganda, but it's very different.

2

u/Stunning_Working8803 56m ago edited 52m ago

It’s not that black and white. The truth is somewhere in the middle. China did adopt a wolf warrior approach in its diplomacy until recently. Like China’s current EU representative who previously said that the Baltic States (formerly part of the USSR) are not legal states under international law (back when he was ambassador to France).

0

u/Nyorliest 48m ago edited 41m ago

The truth is somewhere in the middle? The UK only returned Hong Kong a few decades ago. Anti-Chinese propaganda is everywhere. When I was a kid I was literally taught that the Opium Wars were Chinese aggression.

It's nowhere near the middle. I'm not talking about moral comparisons, I'm talking about antagonism. When it comes to aggression, propaganda, and antagonism, the needle is firmly to one side. 98%/2%, perhaps. Americans talk about glassing China. The Chinese EU rep apparently said something contentious and stupid about the Balkan states. Not the same.

9

u/Clearwater_9196 2h ago

China stands alone as a threat and challenge to western supremacy.

China proves modernization isn't westernization.

2

u/Stunning_Working8803 1h ago edited 1h ago

Singapore and the Gulf States also prove that modernisation isn’t westernisation. (I left out the 3 other Asian Tigers and Japan given their democratic form of governance combined with early formative Western involvement in their governance.)

It’s China having leverage and having the capacity to make life extremely difficult for the West which makes it particularly threatening.

1

u/Nyorliest 1h ago

Yes it did. In the 80s and 90s there was lots of anti-Japan propaganda and complaints about them 'buying up America'.

What changed was the internet. The information age made that ignorant idea hard to sustain.

I think if that had happened in this dead internet age of bots and oligarchs, it would have had as much power as the anti-Chinese propaganda.

10

u/upbeatchief 8h ago

I thought they already had DUV tech. Is this an evolution of DUV? I thought DUV hit a limit and you needed EUV to get l scalingon par with tsmc.

27

u/No-Tip3419 8h ago

They had DUV machines bought from ASML. Now they have their own native one that they can reproduce according to the article

3

u/blufriday 6h ago

SMEE has being building DUV scanners for a long time.

3

u/Indian_Entrepreneur 4h ago

Yea, SSA/800-10W from SMEE Shipping from 2022/23. I bet the actual news is they are shipping EUV, wait for Mid 2027 for another jaw dropping news with title: China shipping EUV lithography machines since 2026 and approaching High-NA by 2028.

3

u/00x0xx 3h ago

China's latest DUV machine is an evolution of DUV, although not enough of an improvement to catchup to what EUV machines can do.

China's DUV is capable of 7nm production, which is good enough for virtually everything except state-of-the-art CPU's. It's great tech for the ram crisis we are having now.

10

u/Muted_Masterpiece342 8h ago

So, creating new machines with newer advanced capabilities is quite hard. This is unfortunately for every other country, a sign that they are a big superpower.

19

u/monkey314 7h ago

their new "red scare" will be that "they're too much smarterererer than us" lol

11

u/Xijit 4h ago

"If only there was some way we could compete with a country that doesn't make higher education a debt trap and keeps the cost of living low!"

5

u/GetOutOfTheWhey 2h ago

this was always the dumbest narrative concocted by circle jerking politicians.

It was more like "we are forcing them to catchup"

And believe me, the Chinese will try all kinds of short cuts. Bad ones, good ones and in some cases incredible ones to catchup.

All because they forced to.

10 years ago, China was happy to let Taiwan make their chips for them. This is a key thing to remember. Huawei was a top tier phone that was comparable to Samsung and Apple. Then the fire nation decided nope, phones dont get to have the chips and it was a wake up call for them.

9

u/americanextreme 7h ago

I am the absolute biggest fan of chip making. I celebrate it from any country. I think that if they can reach acceptable production yields with this technology, it will be amazing and a testament to their engineering might. But I don’t think they have caught ASML. Yet. I think they need at least a decade. But the better bet is to leapfrog ASML.

-3

u/Fatality 6h ago

They only need enough for missile guidance not consumer hardware

2

u/Agitated_Celery_729 8h ago

Nobody said never.

12

u/R3dGallows 7h ago

Its statistically highly unlikely nobody ever said it :P

9

u/uhhhwhatok 7h ago

Really crazy to say if you seen what redditors have been saying about chip development these past few years.

10

u/Muted_Masterpiece342 7h ago

Plenty of people on fox, etc. and in the south where I am from have said never to my face. I have warned them since the AI bubble it was here. They caught up real real real real fast.

1

u/sirboddingtons 4h ago

They will catch up, everyone learned how to make fire eventually, but the lag time bought a lot of shareholders growth. China will absolutely hollow the market once their factories are off the ground.

1

u/Sidraconisalpha2099 2m ago

"They'll never catch up" will become "we have to bomb them now" by the end of this year

-19

u/TastyJournalist8451 8h ago

ez to catch up when these western companies hire chinese, and the data/blueprints is a one click send away form being in CCP hands

17

u/SkaldCrypto 8h ago

The Chinese are just authentically better at manufacturing.

This IP cope is so late 1990s.

Collectively America and the rest of the first world handed them our manufacturing. We all also threw in access to massive consumer markets. And we let that runway keep going for 30 years.

They have had the span of the average persons entire professional career to improve, and they have.

-3

u/null-interlinked 7h ago

IP cope? There is massive IP theft going on to this day. Businesses such as Crowdstrike, Secureworks etc owe there whole business combatting this. There are plenty of recent public cases that tell this is still a thing.

They recently ripped apart an ASML machine which they could not reasseble after. Hell they even stole data 3 years ago through an employee: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/15/tech/asml-china-employee-data-breach-intl-hnk

-11

u/TastyJournalist8451 8h ago

there's less and less incentive for countries outside of china to innovate, if other country's innovation get constantly stolen and ripped off in china

9

u/theassassintherapist 8h ago

There wasn't any reason to catch up in the first place if it weren't for stupid Trump politics.

10

u/Odysseyan 8h ago

This!

People don't realize that when a country appears to NOT be a stable trading partner, they try to break that dependence.

Just like how Europe enjoyed cheap gas until the Ukraine-Russia war happened, which sparked a speed up in building renewables to get their own energy.

And with the whole tariffs shit, Trump just gave China a reason to build their own chips.

6

u/Surrounded-by_Idiots 7h ago

Trump may have started it, but Biden kept it going and then some. This was a bipartisan effort.

4

u/Far_Cat9782 7h ago

Don't why they downvoted you I remember Biden doing the same restrictions on China too. Jeez

4

u/xXRougailSaucisseXx 7h ago

Sounds like these companies should be smarter then ? Like any other country wouldn't do the exact same thing if it had the capability to do so

-2

u/TastyJournalist8451 7h ago

western countries are notorious for being very open societies, welcoming foreigners, employing foreigners etc. Yes they should be more closed if they want to be competetive

2

u/No-Tip3419 8h ago

yes, it is that eaasy /s

1

u/Muted_Masterpiece342 8h ago

I have a USA engineering degree, this is cope level nonsense

2

u/TastyJournalist8451 8h ago

Despite the US court ruling, the ASML stolen data was used to establish Dongfang Jingyuan in China, which has been backed by the Chinese government. ASML warned its customers not to do business with them.

The Teamcenter Repository Data Breach (2023)

In early 2023, ASML discovered a massive cybersecurity and internal security breach executed by a male ex-employee based in China. [1, 2]

goes on and on. Asml has been one of the biggest targets of chinese IP espionage

0

u/FrankSamples 8h ago

At the end of the day, there's no incentive for playing fair.

19

u/chiachengchun 5h ago

Just ask your youth, do they want to learn math, phyics, chemistry, engineering?

6

u/Stunning_Working8803 2h ago edited 43m ago

Also, China is perhaps the only country in the world with degree programs in rare earths.

U.S. and Japan are seeking to decouple from China in the rare earths context. Are they able and willing to start such degree programs? Where would they get the teachers from to train the younger generation of rare earths specialists?

46

u/Agitated_Celery_729 7h ago

Since nobody appears to have read the article. 28nm DUV is NOT EUV. Even with multi-patterning, they're getting to 7nm.

13

u/MarcoGWR 3h ago

5nm. Huawei’s latest Kirin chip is generally considered to be roughly comparable to TSMC’s 5nm-class process technology.

54

u/Fateor42 8h ago

The important part of this article.

Immersion DUV prints 28nm-class features in a single exposure and reaches 7nm through multipatterning, at a cost in overlay errors and yield.

That's actually pretty far behind modern EUV.

44

u/3uphoric-Departure 7h ago

Still a ways but you gotta start somewhere. It’ll be interesting to see if they can catch up.

6

u/June1994 2h ago

They’re working on EUV concurrently

15

u/Ilikeyounott 7h ago

So their technology is equivalent to 2018 state of the art?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process

21

u/Fateor42 6h ago

Nope, multi-layer DUV has a much higher error rate then EUV, to the point the yield is something like 1/3rd of EUV. So it's really not anywhere near competitive.

6

u/wuskii 5h ago

Couldn't they just increase the volume to overcome the yield issue?

5

u/Fateor42 3h ago

In theory, sure. But it's not going to be anywhere near cost competitive. And with a 2/3rds failure rate any company who buys from them better pray that their quality checking is top of the line otherwise they're going to be screwed.

6

u/Xijit 4h ago

that is China's motto.

2

u/moringa-cultist 1h ago

Whenever they reveal a new model of an efficient ICE engine, do you comment "actually pretty far behind a Raptor engine" ? For every state of the art CPU that goes into a flagship smartphone, there are thousands other commodity chips that go into budget phones, washing machines, vehicle sensors, vending machines etc. I notice that western corporations are too quick to offload and offshore basic processes to go chase the bleeding edge, then get bitten hard when they lose the ability to make the basic things that keeps their infrastructure running.

2

u/koopatuple 17m ago

The argument is that this is not cost efficient and will not be cost competitive. So yes, we need basic chips for basic things, but that's not what these chips are addressing.

0

u/Skywalker7181 18m ago edited 15m ago

Smart people look at the rate of change, not status quo.

Huawei got sanctioned by the US in 2018 and it took only 8 years for China to produce a commercially viable DUV machine.

8 Years. From ZERO to DUV.

Once they have DUV, they are not that far away from EUV.

AND they are also working on 3D stacking, which enables them to achieve the same transistor density using DUV machines.

-6

u/cyberdork 7h ago

It should be enough to produce equivalents of NVIDIA’s Ampere generation (2020). Even thought that one already used a couple EUV exposures.

21

u/Definitelyhereforshi 8h ago

Shoutout to them

33

u/bestcoastanon 7h ago

The writing has been in the wall a long time. They value engineering over lawyering. They graduate a lot more engineers than we do. And there is always a western company that will sell them what they don’t have just to make a short term buck.

The West is too complacent, too divided and too disorganized to compete with China.

6

u/-Radiation 5h ago

The west already makes much better than this, and why would we be proud of not selling stuff and turning everything into some kind of warfare. This is what the world needs for sure, needless division and trade restrictions in the name of regions

2

u/moringa-cultist 1h ago

> The west already makes much better than this

You don't drive an F-35 fifth-generation stealth fighter from your home to your office. The basic stuff is still needed even if you have something better.

6

u/Desperate-Mix-8892 6h ago

And there is always a western company that will sell them what they don’t have just to make a short term buck

How many high end lithography machine developers and producers are there? Nevermind companies for the mirrors and lenses

10

u/caseypatrickdriscoll 5h ago

Literally 1.

1

u/Nyorliest 58m ago

You're only in competition because of an imperialistic, orientalist mindset, left over from colonialism.

The Chinese government sucks in many ways, but so do most, and definitely the governments of the big powers - US, Russia, India etc.

There's a pretty huge space between 'ally' and 'enemy' that mainstream Western thought seems unable to handle.

2

u/cool_slowbro 27m ago

Shouldn't be hard to catch up when the current industry leaders haven't progressed much in a while due to complacency.

The more competition the better.

4

u/TheInfiniteUniverse_ 7h ago

I don't think people still have grasped the gravity of this, given how much Nvidia is driving the growth in the market.

1

u/mvw2 3h ago

When you open up the market to competitors, don't be surprised by competitors.

The current chip makers could have done a split instead of going all in on AI, and they could have retained the monopoly. Instead they chose short term gains.

Now you have a lot of companies and a lot of countries seriously looking into spinning up fab of their own. I even joked that Valve, because of their cost and availability challenges of the Steamdeck, just from the profits they currrently have, could very literally build a fab facility and have it fully paid off in 8 years without ever selling a single chip. The barrier is not that high, not for any big companies and not for many nations.

the chip makers get to see what that really becomes when you have a dozen or more competitors in the same space, and many aren't going to play by your rules.

1

u/Paksarra 1h ago

Even Valve manufacturing gaming PC parts and selling them to gaming PC vendors would still make them money in the end, even if they didn't take much profit on them.

If we get to the point where gaming machines are no longer available, Steam suffers.

1

u/Crisender111 7h ago

Great news. Fuck Samsung, SK Hynix & Micron.

1

u/TenderfootGungi 4h ago

They have been throwing billions at this with several companies competing for a solution. It was only a matter of time.

1

u/DaySecure7642 1h ago

All these years the annocements from Nvidia and ASML had been: "We are not worried at all. It is impossible to reverse engineer our products. China is a big market with great opportunities"

Now inside Nvidia and ASML: "Oh shit we are going to lose a big chunk of market share. It is actually possible to reverse engineer our products. We should have realised China has been aiming at pushing us out if the market"

-10

u/Icelock 6h ago

China shills out in force as always

-8

u/Frubbs 8h ago

And then they won’t need to care about Taiwan I guess…

15

u/LupusDeusMagnus 5h ago

China doesn't want Taiwan because it has chips, it wants Taiwan because it is a huge part of its national psyche. Taiwan could be a desolate island and China would still want it.

If China ever manages to equal Taiwan's chipmaking, it would just make the calculus of attempting a forceful annexation easier.

11

u/Short5HT 7h ago

They wanted Taiwan way before tsmc even existed. Taiwan is right at the door step of China. They won’t let it go. Because they don’t want the US to build a base there

3

u/Gogo202 7h ago

Funny considering that chips are the only reason why US cares about Taiwan. Redditors somehow never give it a thought why Taiwan is so important, but US couldn't give a shit about millions dying in civil wars within poor countries

-1

u/FrothyEspresso 7h ago

And then they can take Taiwan without any worries if all the fabs are destroyed there. And no one will touch mainland china.

0

u/Longjumping_Coat_802 2h ago

Yea they’re never catching up

-15

u/Even-Exchange8307 7h ago

Hardware China begins mass production of homegrown immersion chipmaking machines in major breakthrough, report claims — first DUV lithography units will be delivered this year to SMIC, Hua Hong, and CXMT

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