GoKawiilChina's progress toward technological self-sufficiency in recent years is undeniable, but there is one thing that the country has so far failed to develop: lithography tools that are on par with those offered by ASML. That shortcoming has greatly hampered its domestic semiconductor industry. But Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes China will develop its own advanced lithography systems in just three or four years.
"They are going to get there by 2030," Huang said in an interview with The All-In Podcast (at 43:43). "2030 is just around the corner. The way to think about China is that it is really good at high-volume production. It is just a matter of time[...] so two or three years is just a click; it is nothing. So as far as they are concerned, they are already there."
Huang tends to look optimistically at China's technological development. Specifically, he is known for calling China's AI industry as being 'right behind' American frontier labs, which may well be correct, given how much capital China is investing in AI. But when it comes to the Chinese semiconductor industry in general and its lithography sector in particular, Huang may be too optimistic.
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At present, China's leading producer of lithography tools — Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment — can mass-produce a 193-nm ArF dry scanner that can be used to build chips on 90nm-class process technology. While the company has reportedly developed a 28nm-capable ArF immersion scanner, there is no public evidence that such systems are produced in volume and are used for high-volume chip production.
Although there are reports that Shanghai Aishengna Electronic Technology Group (a unit, or an affiliate of SMEE) has delivered its first immersion scanner that may be capable of printing chips using 28nm-class process technology, these tools will require extensive qualification before they can be used for high-volume manufacturing of semiconductors, so if deployment follows standard timelines, it will take years before this unit will be used for mass producing chips.
Even assuming that the first scanners are delivered to Chinese chipmakers in 2026, widespread production use before 2028–2029 appears unlikely. Furthermore, matching the capabilities of an early-generation ASML immersion scanner would still leave Chinese lithography suppliers considerably behind ASML's contemporary systems, which makes technological parity in ArF immersion lithography by 2030 highly unlikely.
China is considerably further behind in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. While there are reports that Chinese scientists have managed to develop a laser-produced plasma source that can generate the 13.5-nanometer wavelength light required for the technology, it does not look like China is close to assembling even a prototype EUV scanner itself.
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Even if China can assemble an EUV experimental exposure platform without having mastered production-quality immersion DUV, it is hard to imagine a Chinese company producing EUV scanners without solving the hardest problems common to both DUV and EUV technologies. A production lithography scanner requires extraordinary capabilities in wafer and reticle stages, alignment, overlay, projection optics, and metrology, just to name a few.
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