The Chinese company, prevented from having its chips manufactured at state-of-the-art nodes with founders like TSMC, has been developing its own production tools for several months now. A patent for a recently filed EUV scanner would allow it to burn in 7nm and less.
It has now been more than two years since Huawei cannot have its cutting-edge chips manufactured by certain foundries, including Taiwanese TSMC, due to restrictive measures taken by the Trump administration. To overcome this problem, the Chinese firm collaborates with the ICRD (Shanghai Integrated Circuit R&D Center) in order to develop its own scanners. In mid-November this year, Huawei applied for patent filing with the China National Intellectual Property Administration for an EUV scanner (patent application number 202110524685X).
This patent application seems to cover all the essential components of an EUV scanner: a 13.5 nm EUV light generator (light source), a set of reflecting mirrors, the lithography system and technologies relating to metrology.
US Demands ASML Stop Selling Lithography Equipment to China
Huawei EUV scanners in a few months?
Naturally, this does not mean that Huawei is already able to build and use a large-scale EUV scanner. Besides manufacturing and qualifying the scanner, mass production would require many other elements, starting with suitable films. But clearly, the company seems on the right track to achieve this within a few months or years. This would allow it to manufacture its chips at etching finenesses of less than 7 nm.
The world leader in the manufacture of EUV scanners is ASML, a Dutch company. It sells its machines to the five founders who use or plan to use such scanners: TSMC, Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron and Intel. One of the main Chinese founders, SMIC, cannot obtain any.
As Anton Shilov of Tom’s Hardware US writes, an EUV scanner with a numerical aperture of 0.33 is state-of-the-art right now; it is the result of a decade of development by ASML, with the financial support of other companies such as TSMC, Intel or Samsung. The future will tell if Huawei’s teams succeed in developing such scanners. With a turnover of around 100 billion dollars (compared to just under 70 billion for Intel in 2022, around 220 billion for Samsung), the Chinese firm has in any case a certain financial basis to achieve this.
Sources : MyDrivers, Tom’s Hardware US
