Only one company in the world is able to build the EUV lithography machines necessary for chip production. Soon China will apparently be able to do it itself. We’ll explain to you what these machines are for and why it’s so difficult to build one.
December 18, 2025, 5:27 p.mDecember 18, 2025, 5:35 p.m
One Reuters report According to China, it is said that it has managed to build a prototype of an EUV lithography machine. This would be a huge breakthrough for the Chinese chip industry with implications for the entire world.
Such machines are necessary to produce the latest generation of microchips. Currently and in the foreseeable future there is only one company in the world that is capable of building these highly complex machines, the Dutch company ASML.
For years, the USA, with the involvement of the West, has been trying to prevent such machines or the technology behind them from falling into Chinese hands. It is no coincidence that the United States has been clearly committed to Taiwan’s autonomy for so long. TSMC, the world’s largest and most modern chip manufacturer, is based there. ASML’s EUV lithography machines are also indispensable there.
The ability to build the latest generation of chips is not only of economic interest and very profitable in the wake of the global AI hype, but also crucial militarily. Anyone who has access to the latest chips can also build the most modern weapon systems.
China’s Manhattan Project
It took ASML several decades to develop EUV lithography. Nobody questioned that China would also be able to develop such machines itself, but a similar, if not longer, time horizon was always assumed. Back in April, ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said China would need many, many years to catch up.
The news that China supposedly already has a prototype comes as a huge surprise. Although the Chinese machine is not yet able to produce functioning chips, it should already produce the necessary EUV light.
The prototype is the result of a six-year initiative by the Chinese government with the stated goal of becoming independent in semiconductor production. China recruited several former ASML employees and allegedly even issued them new documents. They are said to have built the prototype completely under wraps for the last few years. The comparison to the Manhattan Project sounds exaggerated, but from a scientific and technical perspective it is actually much more difficult to build such a modern lithography machine than a nuclear weapon. And as already mentioned, the military implications of this should not be underestimated. In addition, modern computer chips are one of the few things for which China is still largely dependent on the West.
Despite export bans, ASML lithography machines have repeatedly appeared at Chinese auctions. As Reuters reports, a team of over 100 engineers is also busy dismantling parts of EUV and older DUV machines and reconstructing their construction.
The Chinese prototype is much larger than the ASML machine and the high-precision mirrors, which ASML obtains from the German company Zeiss, are apparently difficult to replicate. It remains to be seen whether and how quickly China can actually build a fully functional machine.
However, the Chinese government plans to have a specially manufactured EUV lithography machine as early as 2028.
What exactly does an EUV machine do?
EUV lithography machines are capable of projecting unimaginably tiny structures onto a medium. They are indispensable in the production of state-of-the-art computer chips. The manufacturing process takes place in phases. Starting with a round, 1 mm thick plate made of pure silicon, the so-called wafer. This forms the substrate for the production of several chips.
A modern EUV machine from ASML.image: ASml.com
The 3-dimensional structure of the chip is then built up layer by layer on the wafer. A modern chip has up to 80 vertical layers. For each layer, an oxide layer is first deposited on the wafer. This is then coated with a light-sensitive chemical, onto which the pattern of a layer of the chip is then projected by the EUV machine. Where the chemical has been exposed to light, it becomes soluble and can be washed away in a next cut. So a kind of mask forms on the surface.
Using this mask, the unprotected areas are then selectively etched away. The cavities are finally filled with copper. The chip is built up layer by layer, with the small structures in the lowest layers, such as the transistors and the tiny connections between them, being exposed using EUV lithography machines, while layers higher up need to have a less high resolution.
What makes them so incredibly complicated?
The machine
A modern EUV lithography machine weighs around 150 tons and costs around $380 million. It is only used in so-called clean rooms. The air there can contain a maximum of one particle >0.5 μm per m3 contain. The air filters also filter almost all bacteria and viruses from the air, making the room cleaner than any operating room.
The machines are so complex and multi-part that there is probably no person who fully understands them. Rather, specialists work for years on the smallest components that have to meet the extreme requirements of the machine.
The inner workings of an EUV lithography machine.ASML
The light source
In this case, special light is required for the lithography process. Namely light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, also known as extreme ultraviolet radiation. This light does not occur naturally and must be generated using a complex process.
The machine also has a supply of highly pure tin in liquid form. This is shot into a vacuum chamber in tiny drops, thinner than a human hair, at 100 m/s. The drop’s trajectory is then tracked and calculated using multiple high-speed cameras so that a laser pulse can hit it at exactly the right moment. These calculations in themselves are already more complex than those of the first moon landing.
This prepulse deforms the droplet into a pancake-like shape. This is then bombarded by a much stronger laser pulse. He heats the tin to 220,000° Celsius, 40 times hotter than the surface of the sun. The tin immediately turns into plasma. This plasma in turn emits light in the required wavelength of 13 nanometers.
As if this process wasn’t impressive enough in itself, this also happens 50,000 times per second to produce a continuous stream of light.
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But the light source is also the biggest limitation of the EUV process. Only about 5% of the input energy actually reaches the wafer in this process. The search for a stronger source of EUV radiation has already been carried out, at least in theory the use of our own particle accelerator is discussed.
The mirrors
EUV radiation is absorbed by pretty much all materials, even air. That’s why the entire light path must take place in a strong vacuum. Due to the absorption, the EUV radiation cannot be directed with lenses, as with other methods, but only with special mirrors. Only the German company Zeiss can produce these. Their surface must be so perfectly flat that the deviation cannot be greater than a single hydrogen atom. For comparison: If the mirror were as big as the Earth, the largest deviation would be about the size of a credit card. The mirror in the new James Webb telescope is about 20 times less accurate.
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Inside an EUV machine there are 6 such mirrors as well as 2 more specialized facet mirrors that can direct the light beam into precise patterns.
The movement
ASml
During the exposure process, both the reflective mask, which shapes the light into the actual chip pattern, and the wafer itself move. This with a speed of up to 150 m/s and an acceleration of up to 15 g, completely synchronously and with precision in the nanometer range, without generating the slightest vibration. I don’t know if there really is a meaningful comparison here, it’s simply almost unimaginably accurate.
So even if China had a complete working machine at its disposal, it would still be quite a feat to completely recreate it.
Video: Watson/Lucas Zollinger