The effort that \u00a0Chinese lithography equipment\u00a0 is making to develop their own \u00a0avant-garde machines\u00a0 is titanic. And, as expected, the Xi Jinping government \u00a0is supporting these companies\u00a0 with multimillionaire subsidies. In fact, at the beginning of September 2023, it approved a game of no less than \u00a0$41 billion\u00a0 allocated precisely to the companies that produce the equipment involved in the manufacture of \u00a0integrated circuits\u00a0.<\/p>\n
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One of these companies is \u00a0Pulin Technology\u00a0. This Chinese organization has opted, like Naura Technology, Amec (\u00a0Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Inc. China\u00a0), or Piotech Inc., for developing their own avant-garde photolithography machines. The achievements are getting little by little. The recent signing by Pulin is impressive because, according to Digitimes Asia<\/a>, it has sent one of its customers its first avant-garde team using \u00a0nano-impression lithography technology\u00a0 (known as \u00a0NIL\u00a0 by its English denomination, \u00a0Nanoimprint Lithography\u00a0).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We still do not know in detail the characteristics of the new lithography equipment developed by Pulin, but it doesn’t matter. In reality, NIL technology is not new. The \u00a0Japanese Canon\u00a0 company has had its own commercial solution for years, and presumably, its principles of operation are essentially similar to those of the machine designed by Pulin. Canon began working on Lithography NIL in \u00a02004\u00a0. Thirteen years later, in \u00a02017\u00a0, it delivered the \u00a0FPA-1200NZ2C\u00a0 machine, its first functional NIL machine, to \u00a0Toshiba\u00a0 to be installed in its Yokkaichi memory chips production plant in Japan.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Pulin Technology has sent one of its customers its first avant-garde team using nano-impression lithography technology.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n On paper, NIL photolithography equipment is an alternative to \u00a0extreme ultraviolet lithography machines (UVE)\u00a0 that the \u00a0Dutch company ASML\u00a0 designs and manufactures, although not to the highest opening version of these machines. The latter are currently the \u00a0most sophisticated and expensive\u00a0 that exist. In this article, we do not need to delve into the foundations of NIL lithography, but we are interested in the knowledge that its integrated circuit manufacturing strategy is different from that used by the UVE and \u00a0UVP\u00a0 lithography equipment (\u00a0deep ultraviolet\u00a0).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Very broadly, the production of \u00a0silicon wafers\u00a0 in the latter requires transporting the geometric pattern described by the mask to the surface of the silicon wafer using \u00a0ultraviolet light\u00a0 and \u00a0extremely refined optical elements\u00a0. NIL lithography, however, allows the pattern to be transferred to the wafer without the need for an extremely complex optical system to intervene in the process. This strategy is simpler and more economical, but it also entails the execution of several sequential processes that make it slower than UVE and UVP lithography.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Canon ensures that their nano-impression lithography equipment can be used to manufacture integrated circuits comparable to \u00a05 nm\u00a0 chips that \u00a0TSMC, Samsung,\u00a0 or \u00a0Intel\u00a0 produce with ASML UVE machines. In the future, with the refinements that will arrive, \u00a0they can manufacture 2 nm chips\u00a0. However, this is not all. Besides, according to Fujio Mitarai<\/a>, General Director of Canon, a NIL machine costs \u00a0ten times less\u00a0 than an ASML UVE machine: \u00a0$15 million\u00a0 compared to the $150 million requested by the Dutch company for a UVE machine with a numerical opening of \u00a00.33\u00a0. We still do not know how much each Pulin NIL machine will cost, but it is reasonable to anticipate that at most, it will have a cost comparable to that of the Canon machine.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For further information, visit Digitimes Asia<\/a>.<\/p>\n Japan aims to end the leadership of the Netherlands in lithography teams. This is their plan to achieve it.<\/p>\nOn paper, this machine is an alternative to ASML UVE equipment<\/h2>\n