For the previous 20 years, superior semiconductor manufacturing has been dominated by a small set of firms within the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, South Korea, and the USA, largely as a result of proprietary know-how concerned in producing such chips. China, nevertheless, has been making an attempt to empty that moat. When Reuters reported in December 2025 that researchers in Shenzhen had secretly constructed a prototype for an excessive ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine, an indispensable piece of apparatus for producing essentially the most superior chips, commentators debated when China will have the ability to overcome one of many final remaining obstacles to manufacturing its personal superior semiconductors.
Whether or not this prototype is a near-term inflection level or a mere steppingstone on an extended journey stays tough to foretell. Chinese language insiders declare that 2030 is a “real looking goal” for making working chips from its prototype, whereas skeptics posit that it’ll take many years to achieve industrial viability.
There’s a option to lower by the noise. Constructing an EUV machine depends upon particular technical chokepoints that may be recognized and monitored. Three of crucial are creating high-power, ultra-low-wavelength mild sources that print the circuit patterns; creating extremely easy mirrors that mirror EUV mild onto silicon wafers with atomic-scale precision; and producing the ultra-pure, light-sensitive photoresist chemical substances which convert the sunshine blueprint right into a bodily stencil for the chip’s microscopic wires.
China’s timeline towards an EUV machine is unsure, however monitoring these particular areas might help analysts and policymakers gauge how shut Beijing is to semiconductor self-reliance.
Desk 1. The place China Is vs. Business Normal for EUV Lithography
The Query of When
Policymakers, students, and business analysts haven’t reached a consensus on China’s timeline towards a home EUV machine. Estimates vary from a couple of years to a number of many years.
China’s use of expertise poaching and smuggling for overcoming the EUV lithography moat has achieved some outcomes. As an illustration, China’s breakthrough in laser-produced plasma in March 2025 got here from a group on the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Positive Mechanics led by Lin Nan, who beforehand led mild supply know-how at Dutch EUV manufacturing firm ASML. China’s developments in precision optics have likewise relied on expertise poaching, as exhibited by Huawei’s repeated makes an attempt to lure precision optics engineers from Zeiss with enticing salaries. China has additionally made vital progress by so-called hybrid engineering, which mixes reverse engineering of current Western EUV know-how with home improvements.
Some commentators, corresponding to Albright Stonebridge Group know-how coverage lead Paul Triolo, have drawn on these indicators to take a usually much less skeptical view of China’s EUV progress than different analysts. In line with Triolo, business observers consider that an “EUV prototype has been ‘full’ for nearly two years.” Triolo prompt that in a bullish situation, Chinese language firms may develop EUV capabilities in pilot traces round 2030.
Different consider this view overstates China’s capabilities. Analyst Greg Allen has argued China’s potential to provide an EUV machine prototype was extra probably the results of evading export controls than it was a real home innovation. China’s problem, subsequently, might be understood as catching up not simply to the place ASML was, however to the place ASML goes. As TechInsights vice chair and semiconductor analyst Dan Hutcheson famous, “The more durable they [China] run, they only keep in place.”
It’s no marvel creating an EUV various is tough. EUV machines are a few of the most advanced machines people have ever made. An ASML scanner consists of a community of nicely over 100,000 elements. Chris Miller, writer of “Chip Struggle,” argued that the roughly three many years of world analysis required to develop the primary industrial EUV system means that China’s personal timeline can be an extended one. This skepticism is strengthened by China’s present reliance on older, foreign-made deep ultraviolet (DUV) machines regardless of purported EUV breakthroughs. Whereas SMIC has efficiently produced superior chips utilizing this older know-how, its yield charges stay a fraction of these TSMC achieves with EUV lithography, casting doubt on the scalability of its home manufacturing.
The Mild Supply
Moderately than try and resolve the controversy between the optimists and the pessimists, it might be extra helpful to determine the technical moats that may assist distinguish between the 2 worlds sooner or later. Discussions about when China will overcome the EUV lithography moat revolve round three non-exhaustive however essential elements, which have been tightly regulated by Western export restrictions.
The primary is the sunshine supply. China is making progress on creating the EUV mild itself however should nonetheless make headway on producing it at a excessive sufficient energy output to fabricate chips at a commercially viable scale. EUV mild has a wavelength quick sufficient to permit for extremely tight patterns to be etched onto silicon wafers. Miller famous that the lasers in ASML’s most superior machines require 457,329 components on their very own – a determine for the laser subsystem alone, not the total scanner. The high-power CO2 drive laser is constructed by Germany’s Trumpf, whereas the encompassing light-source module is equipped by Cymer, a San Diego agency ASML acquired in 2013. ASML integrates these into the entire machine, which has been barred from China since 2019.
Chinese language labs have launched into a parallel effort to each reverse engineer the lasering course of that ASML makes use of, in addition to pioneer their very own options. Services on the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Positive Mechanics and Harbin Institute of Expertise respectively have made substantial progress within the R&D and prototyping of the EUV mild supply. But there are nonetheless obstacles that hinder industrial manufacturing.
The EUV mild from each strategies at the moment has an influence output of 100-150 watts – not as highly effective because the 250 watts of output that ASML’s mild supply achieved in 2017 to provide 125 wafers per hour, nor its present benchmark of 600 watts, and nowhere close to the 1000-watt system the corporate introduced in early 2026 analysis. And in comparison with ASML, China’s lasers lose an excessive amount of power to warmth and non-EUV wavelengths as a substitute of manufacturing sufficient usable 13.5-nm mild. The system should thus expose wafers for an extended interval, which etches the patterns too slowly to be economically aggressive.
In consequence, indications that China is making progress towards reaching the preliminary 250-watt energy benchmark with out dropping an excessive amount of power to warmth and different wavelengths may function a signpost that the home program is lastly transitioning from a laboratory proof-of-concept to a commercially viable manufacturing actuality.
Precision Optics
As soon as EUV mild is created, it must be collected, formed, and directed by a collection of ultra-flat mirrors – essentially the most superior are designed by German firm Zeiss – earlier than it will possibly etch microscopic transistor patterns onto a wafer. That is the place China’s EUV prototype faces its second main moat.
Peter Kürz, a spokesperson for the Zeiss EUV group, has in contrast this achievement to making a mirror so exact that “you might redirect a laser beam to hit a golf ball on the floor of the moon.” Zeiss achieved this feat by sprucing the floor to subatomic flatness. The result’s a mirror so easy that if it had been the dimensions of Germany, the tallest peak could be lower than 1 mm. And even with all that precision, every mirror can nonetheless mirror a theoretical most of solely 70 p.c of the EUV mild that hits it.
China has achieved restricted success in these optical applied sciences because of researchers on the Chinese language Academy of Sciences, in addition to elements from Japanese firms Nikon and Canon. Researchers on the Changchun Institute of Optics, Positive Mechanics, and Physics designed an optical system with comparable mirrors layered with molybdenum and silicon, which had been every reportedly capable of mirror about 65 p.c of the EUV mild. Whereas this 5 proportion level distinction could sound small, a typical EUV machine makes use of ten to 12 mirrors to mirror and focus the EUV mild onto the wafer, compounding the consequences. The result’s that China’s finest mirrors require considerably extra energy output or publicity time from the sunshine supply to get the identical throughput of usable wafers that ASML does with its smoother mirrors.
A number of breakthroughs may sign that China is gaining floor on this space. As an illustration, Chinese language optical analysis labs may produce prototypes or spin-offs of the ion beam figuring know-how that allows sub-nanometer sprucing of their mirrors. Or they may make breakthroughs in home metrology instruments, which permit Zeiss to measure and confirm floor irregularities on the picometer scale. The Chinese language Academy of Sciences is at the moment creating its personal EUV microscopy strategies to determine chip defects, representing an rising home metrology effort in China.
Photoresists
As soon as the EUV mild etches its sample, a light-sensitive chemical coating referred to as photoresist determines which components of the wafer are protected and that are etched away. These chemical coatings act as photographic movie for microchips. China can produce them, however not but on the purity ranges required for EUV lithography.
Chipmakers corresponding to TSMC supply 95 p.c of their EUV photoresists from Japan attributable to its distinctive potential to provide ultra-pure chemical substances required for superior chips. China, too, buys some 90 p.c of its high-end photoresist provide from Japan regardless of an aggressive push to develop home manufacturing. In comparison with different elements of EUV lithography, China has discovered it harder to poach the few prime personnel who know the entire method for these ultra-pure chemical substances, and the six-month shelf lives of completed batches make stockpiling tough.
China has been making progress, nevertheless. Corporations like Xuzhou B&C Chemical, Shanghai Sinyang, Crimson Avenue, and Jingrui are all racing towards self-reliance on the argon-fluoride (ArF) photoresists used to fabricate superior nodes, though lower than 1 p.c of the chemical is at the moment sourced domestically. For its half, Xuzhou B&C claims it’s going to mass-produce a number of core photoresist supplies for superior nodes inside 5 years.
For EUV lithography, a telltale barrier of Chinese language progress stays the purity of its photoresist. The impurity threshold for EUV photoresists is within the sub-parts-per-billion to parts-per-trillion, for which China is barely within the nascent levels of R&D. In July 2025, nevertheless, a group at Tsinghua College introduced a breakthrough within the growth of EUV photoresists utilizing a formulation completely different from that utilized by Japanese firms. It’s a promising lab consequence, nevertheless it nonetheless has an extended option to go earlier than it might be utilized in an precise manufacturing unit. If these new photoresist efforts turn into sensible for prime quantity manufacturing, it might sign that China is making strides in direction of this purity purpose.
There are numerous predictions for when China will produce a commercially viable EUV lithography machine, however none will be verified upfront. A extra productive framing is narrower: the place is China falling quick, and what would progress seem like? There must be systematic surveillance of the three features examined right here – mild supply energy, mirror smoothness, and photoresist purity – to trace the place China is gaining floor. Whereas monitoring these moats could not definitively resolve the bigger “when” query, they can provide observers clues because the second approaches.
