Ex-asml Workers Reverse-engineered State Of The Art Chipmaking...

China might really be on the heels of the West, this time.

If this were a game of Civilization, we'd certainly be moving into the "Future Era", which the game's wiki describes as containing "marvels beyond the dreams of ancient prophets, and terrors more fearsome than any apocalypse." I mean, we literally shine extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light created by molten tin at 50,000 times or more per second to trace miniscule circuits onto silicon wafers. All in the name of beaming Netflix and games into our eyeballs from increasingly small devices with better battery life. And the Western civilisation isn't the only one to broach the Future Era and have this capability, it now seems.

According to two Reuters sources, China now has a prototype EUV chipmaking machine. It's not yet produced a working chip—that's anticipated to happen in 2028 by the Chinese government and more likely to be 2030—but it is apparently creating EUV light. The light source being one of (admittedly quite a few) technical marvels of the EUV machine today.

This is a big deal because the West has previously had the entire monopoly on the advanced chipmaking market. The Dutch company ASML has been the sole producer of EUV machines, the likes of which chipmakers like TSMC buy up to keep the world's semiconductor industry churning out chips. But according to the Reuters sources, some ex-ASML workers have reverse-engineered these machines and made a new one for China.

Although it's important to note that Reuters relays its sources as claiming that China's machine is "crude compared to ASML's machines but operational enough for testing." So, closer, but still not quite there.

This development seems a little out of the blue for Western industry watchers. The last we'd heard, according to ASML's CEO last year, was that China was still 10–15 years behind the West in its chipmaking capabilities (via Tom's Hardware). In fact, tech author Marc Hijink relays in his book Focus: The ASML way that a few years prior to this, the previous ASML CEO said China was "light-years behind. Light-years!"

ASML took many years to perfect the EUV machine into something that could produce a large number of wafers and run over long periods without requiring constant maintenance. It blew past expectations of when it'd be done, and even today the company is said to tweak its machines while they're deployed. So, having some of the parts for EUV is far from having all of the parts for EUV. It's still highly possible Chin

Source: PC Gamer