One would expect that reverse engineering technologies wouldn’t be impossible.
The importance of these technologies for China is huge.
Moreover, they have a massive budget and probably also own a couple of ASML’s euv lithography machines.
Why is it that they cant remake these machines?
I heard some sources say that it might take them a decade.
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Something to understand is that precision machining is HARD. People have a really hard time comprehending this. The reason why the US absolutely dominated WWII wasn’t just because of its industrial output. It was because of its ability to output precision consistently at scale.
Here’s a story. The simple ballpoint pen that people use everyday and have been around for decades. The last few decades most of them have come from China. But China was not able to produce ballpoint pens from 100% domestic components until **2017**. This is because the steel ball in the pens need to be manufactured with extreme precision and consistency or else it won’t work that well. Prior to 2017, China had to import all the steel balls from the US and the EU who were the only ones able to manufacture them with enough precision and consistency.
This is what China struggles with to this day. High tech and high precision manufacturing. The US and the EU still absolutely dominate in this field. Fundamentally it’s because doing this is hard, it’s expensive, and it requires a lot of skill/knowledge to pull off.
A more relevant story is how the CCP sank billions of dollars over the last decade to build out domestic DUV lithography machine production. They failed, they have no domestic producers of DUV lithography machines and by now the companies they started have largely gone bankrupt. They’re still completely dependent on the EU and Japan to supply DUV lithography machines.
EUV is on a completely different level from DUV. It’s like going from a Model T to a Lamborghini in the semiconductor world. ASML did not develop the machines by themselves. ASML collaborated with multiple other companies and national governments to pull it off. The US government alone invested billions of dollars into the partnerships with ASML which is why the Biden administration can put pressure on them to block exports of EUV machines to China. And the kicker is that it took well over 2 decades of R&D from the best minds in the world to develop the technology. China does not have access to that level of expertise.
If China can’t even copy DUV lithography machines, they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of pulling off EUV in the next decade even if they got a fully assembled machine shipped to them. Something many people don’t know is that Japan got really close to getting EUV working themselves, but the 2008 financial crisis basically forced the companies pouring money into it to stop because they couldn’t afford it. Let that sink in for a moment. An extremely wealthy country who was historically been dominant in the lithography industry and has some of the brightest minds in the field didn’t have the resources to successfully produce an EUV machine.
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