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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EUV requires a great understanding of some pretty high level physics. It generates extreme UV using laser pulsed tin droplet plasma, it’s going to take a while to get that down.
You don’t just magically learn the underlying physics and understand the quirks by taking something apart.
There are lots of fiddly little quirks in real engineering that are often subtle or even completely masked by how the system was built, especially when dealing with processes in the nanometer scale. Slight variations in the tin droplets could change the distribution of the UV. A motor that vibrates a bit different because they picked a different type of bearing could result in everything being garbage.
EUV research started in the 1990s but it wasn’t until 2018 that the first machine came to be. Reverse engineering, building, qualifying, and mass producing machines within a decade would still be a 3x speed up.
You’re also left with, why make the same thing?
If you’re going to spend 10-20 years and $100B on pretty raw R&D, why make today’s system? Why not work to design the system you’re going to need in 10 years? This is also why no one is really competing with ASML for EUV machines, don’t spend billions breaking into an established market when there is a new one just around the corner you could claim all of for the same price
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