GoKawiilReuters has named Shanghai Aishengna Electronic Technology Group as the state-owned company producing China's first domestic immersion deep ultraviolet lithography (DUV) scanners, a day after news of the program broke without identifying the manufacturer. Aishengna was established in August 2023 with RMB 7 billion, around $1 billion, in registered capital and is thought to have absorbed engineering teams from Shanghai Yuliangsheng Technology and Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment.
Aishengna has been named by a single source who declined to be named, and its shareholders, SMEE and Yuliangsheng, didn’t respond to requests for comment. SMIC has been testing a Yuliangsheng immersion tool since September 2025, and first deliveries are slated for SMIC, Hua Hong Semiconductor, and ChangXin Memory Technologies.
Photoresist, coater tracks, and light sources
Tokyo Electron held an 89% share of the global coater/developer market in 2022, per Shared Research's analysis of the company's own disclosures, with its chief executive putting the figure near 90% and at 100% for EUV production. A scanner only exposes the wafer, however. It’s the track that's responsible for applying the resist film, baking it, and developing the pattern after exposure, and it has to be mechanically and thermally matched to the scanner in a single cluster, which is why the two are bought together. Shenyang Kingsemi has reached 28nm-class track capability and is currently targeting 14nm.
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JSR, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo, Shin-Etsu, and Fujifilm hold a combined 72.5% of the ArF photoresist market, while Chinese suppliers hold under 1% of ArF immersion resist specifically. Nata Opto-electronic built a 25-ton ArF line, later expanded to 50 tons, passed customer qualification in December 2020, and completed project acceptance in 2024 with little volume to show for it. Xuzhou B&C says its ArF immersion products cover 45nm to 28nm and can stretch to 14nm, and chairman Fu Zhiwei has put mass production of China's core advanced resists five years out.
Cymer, Gigaphoton, and Coherent hold more than 80% of the ArF excimer laser market between them, and Cymer has been an ASML subsidiary since 2013. Beijing RSLaser shipped China's first high-power domestic excimer laser in 2018 under the national Project 02 program and has a 4 kHz 193nm ArF prototype aimed at 90nm and 65nm-class tools, generations behind what 28nm immersion requires.
Carl Zeiss SMT has been ASML's sole projection optics supplier since 1983, and Zeiss SMT revenue grew from €1.2 billion in 2016 to €4.1 billion in 2024. It’s not currently known what, if any, Japanese tooling is inside the Aishengna machines, but excimer sources and precision optics are areas where Chinese substitution is believed to be lacking.
CXMT
CXMT is projected to reach around 350,000 wafer starts per month by the end of 2026, roughly 25,000 short of Micron, up from 40,000 in 2020. DRAM scaling at 1a and 1b-class nodes runs on immersion multipatterning because CXMT has no EUV access, which makes any potential ramp lithography-gated rather than cleanroom-gated. DRAM contract prices rose 93% to 98% quarter on quarter in Q1 2026, and TrendForce projected a further 58% to 63% in Q2, lifting DRAM industry revenue 81% to $97 billion. A domestic immersion source is therefore worth having to CXMT, even at inferior overlay and throughput.
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