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China's Trade-offs in Producing Chips Without EUV

ChipsOctober 25, 20262 min read

China can now make advanced chips without EUV, the special machines it cannot buy because of US limits. But the work costs more, yields fewer good chips, and takes longer.

China finds a way around EUV

Chinese chip makers are finding ways to make advanced chips without EUV lithography. EUV is a type of machine that prints very tiny circuits on silicon. China cannot get these machines because of US restrictions. Instead, Chinese firms mainly use an older machine type called DUV. An analyst at UBS said China seems to be at the stage ASML was at around 2004. ASML is the Dutch company that makes these machines.

Key numbers

Between 2012 and 2026, Chinese chip makers gathered about 343 DUV machines, according to a report from the Centre for Technology & Statecraft (CTS).
270 of those machines are ASML's Twinscan NXT:1980i, with 38 nm resolution.
Moving from 7 nm to 5 nm with multi-patterning may add about 20% more production steps, according to Reuters.
China plans to make about 5 DUV machines this year and about 20 next year, according to The Information.

How China is getting by

Huawei's Kirin 9000S chip, found in the Mate 60 Pro in 2023, was made by SMIC using a second-generation 7 nm process without EUV machines. In August, TechInsight said SMIC pushed its DUV systems closer to the density of 5 nm technology. China has also started making its own DUV machines, with help from a state-backed startup, Shanghai Yuliangsheng Technology.

Why the trade-off matters

DUV uses a 193 nm light wave, while EUV uses 13.5 nm. To make very small parts, factories must split one circuit pattern into several simpler patterns and repeat the printing steps. This adds cost, extra steps, and more chances for errors. Experts say the cost can be similar at first, but EUV becomes cheaper when DUV needs four or more passes. Each extra step can cause errors in line size and alignment, so yield, meaning the share of good chips, can fall. For China, this shows it can keep moving forward, but at a higher price.

What to watch

Whether China's domestic DUV machines reach the planned output of about 5 machines this year and 20 next year.
Whether SMIC, Hua Hong Semiconductor and CXMT get enough machines to grow production.
Whether chip yields improve as multi-patterning becomes more common.
Whether US restrictions on EUV and related tools change.

Glossary

EUV: Extreme ultraviolet lithography, a very advanced way to print tiny circuits on chips, which China cannot currently buy.
DUV: Deep ultraviolet lithography, an older printing method that China mainly uses today to make chips.
ASML: A Dutch company that makes chip-printing machines, including EUV and DUV tools.
SMIC: Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, a major Chinese company that makes chips.
Centre for Technology & Statecraft (CTS): A research group in Washington that studies technology and national policy.

Same story, different eyes

The EngineerAI

Printing one chip pattern three or four times: a clever workaround

Seen as an engineer would, splitting one circuit into several simpler patterns is a neat trick: the 193 nm DUV light is coarser, so you print in several passes instead of one. The tricky part is that every pass has to line up with the layer beneath it, so small errors can add up, and that must be a real challenge to tune. It's fascinating that the cost looks roughly equal to EUV at three exposures, and how yield holds up as passes increase is not yet publicly known.

The StrategistAI

Export controls turned China's chip race into a cost-versus-time trade, not a hard wall

Seen through a tech-geopolitics lens, the interesting thing is that the EUV ban didn't block the path so much as change its price. Stockpiling hundreds of DUV tools since 2012, plus starting domestic immersion DUV production, suggests Beijing was hedging for this scenario well before the restrictions landed. For Washington and The Hague, the question becomes less about whether China can reach advanced nodes and more about how much extra cost, yield loss and time it has to absorb along the way, which is a different kind of leverage to think about. How far multi-patterning yields can improve at scale is still not publicly known.

The SkepticAI

Three DUV exposures can cost about the same as one EUV pass

What caught my eye is Chris Mack's rule of thumb: at around three DUV exposures the cost roughly matches one EUV exposure, and at four, EUV starts to pull ahead. So the useful thing to watch is how many exposures SMIC's 5 nm-class layers actually need. If yield and cycle-time figures at that layer count become public, the trade-off would be much easier to judge. How those numbers look in real production is not yet known.

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