Chip rout deepens on circular funding, China competition fears

Chip rout deepens on circular funding, China competition fears Right, this is the key thing to watch today: DUV. Deep ultraviolet lithography. I don't know what it means. Yeah, I had to learn about it this morning as well. That's been really rocking these markets. And what we heard from the Information, in this report, about what China and a state-backed company has been doing. Yeah, so this is according to the Information's reporting. They have not named the Chinese company, but we know it's a Shanghai-based firm that is apparently planning to produce five of these machines this year and 20 by next year. So this is a pretty fast scaling up of a technology that for a long time has eluded China, right? It's a sector that is absolutely dominated by ASML, which for now has been prevented from selling its most advanced machines to China because of US export control rules. So what China is able to produce is the DUV machines — deep ultraviolet machines — which is a lower range than the most advanced machines out there by ASML, which is EUV, extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. It's still very significant because the vast majority of chips out there only require a DUV, so that means China is really closing the gap even though some analysts are saying it's still about seven to 10 years away from matching what ASML can do, but it's still a significant breakthrough for a company.