Canon s 5nm lithography machine costs only 10 of EUV, so why not sell it to China?

Mondo Technology Updated on 2024-01-30

Canon's 5nm lithography machine is only 10% of the EUV, so why not sell it to China?

As we all know, some time ago, Canon officially announced on its official website that its NILFPA-1200NZ2C nanoimprint lithography machine production equipment was shipped, and this lithography machine is different from EUV lithography machine, which bypasses EUV's other nanoimprint technologies and can produce 5nm chips.

For a while, the entire chip circle was shocked, because all chip manufacturing below 7nm had to use EUV lithography machines, and only ASML could produce EUV lithography machines in the world.

However, at that time, many people were skeptical about Canon's NIL nanoimprint lithography machine because they did not know when it would be sold, and what the cost, energy efficiency, efficiency, and yield ratio would be.

Some time ago, Fujio Mitsui, CEO of Canon, agreed to an interview and mentioned a series of key indicator parameters, which may partially resolve everyone's doubts.

According to Fujio Mitsui, Canon's nanoimprint lithography machine sales are only about 10% of that of EUV lithography machines. At the same time, its energy consumption is only 10% of that of EUV technology.

More importantly, from the perspective of total investment cost, the equipment investment cost can be reduced to about 40% of the original EUV equipment by using NIL nanoimprint technology.

As for nanoimprint lithography, Fujio Mitsui said that it can give customers more flexibility in low-volume wafer production, and even allow wafer design factories to not have to rely on foundries for wafer flow and low-volume wafer production.

It can be speculated that its mass production capacity should not be too strong, after all, for the general wafer design company, a large-scale production line is not necessary, and only a small batch of production lines is required to verify it, so nanoimprint lithography technology is more suitable for small-scale production.

Huawei is a chip design factory, but at the moment due to well-known reasons, manufacturing is blocked, so it urgently needs this equipment to produce its own chips, using the 5nm process.

Fujio Mitsui has confirmed that this set of equipment cannot be sold to China, which was previously included in Japan's export control list"This is a printing lithography system that can reach a linewidth of 45 nm or less"restrictions.

The clearest rule is that the equipment used to make chips of 14nm and below cannot be exported to Chinese mainland, so Canon cannot sell this equipment to China.

But in any case, although it can't be bought for the time being, it also gives us a direction, and at the same time gives ASML a blow, and the follow-up EUV lithography machine is not so godly.

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