Of course, these machines didn’t come out of nowhere, either. These are the best top-of-the-line chip-making machines, but they were developed incrementally from earlier not-quite-so-amazing machines, and those were developed from others, and so on. I’m sure that China does already have chip-making machines of some level: They’re not starting from scratch.
Not really, except for development within AMSL. This is a much different thing than previous chip making machines. EUV is another way to say X-ray and generating sufficiently strong X-rays and getting X-rays to reflect off mirrors is very different than for UV. They needed a lot of different specialists to work out all the things in that machine. The thing is, China does have all those different specialists, including some that worked for AMSL.
Even the masks have to be insanely high tech:
EUV photomasks work by reflecting light,[15] which is achieved by using multiple alternating layers of molybdenum and silicon. This is in contrast to conventional photomasks which work by blocking light using a single chromium layer on a quartz substrate. An EUV mask consists of 40–50[16] alternating silicon and molybdenum layers;[17] this is a multilayer which acts to reflect the extreme ultraviolet light through Bragg diffraction; the reflectance is a strong function of incident angle and wavelength, with longer wavelengths reflecting more near normal incidence and shorter wavelengths reflecting more away from normal incidence. The multilayer may be protected by a thin ruthenium layer, called a capping layer.[16][18][19] The pattern is defined in a tantalum-based absorbing layer over the capping layer.[20]
Blank photomasks are mainly made by two companies: AGC Inc. and Hoya Corporation.[21] Ion-beam deposition equipment mainly made by Veeco is often used to deposit the multilayer.[16] A blank photomask is covered with photoresist, which is then baked (solidified) in an oven, and later the pattern is defined on the photoresist using maskless lithography with an electron beam. This step is called exposure.[22] The exposed photoresist is developed (removed), and the unprotected areas are etched. The remaining photoresist is then removed. Masks are then inspected and later repaired using an electron beam.[23] Etching must be done only in the absorbing layer[16] and thus there is a need to distinguish between the capping and the absorbing layer, which is known as etch selectivity[24] and is unlike etching in conventional photomasks, which only have one layer critical to their function.[25]
From
One mask can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and carving a chip can take dozens of masks.