CAS's 5nm lithography technology has little to do with mask aligner. In fact, the news source of "5nm laser lithography technology breakthrough of Chinese Academy of Sciences" is a paper on the website of Chinese Academy of Sciences. The main content of this paper is actually a progress in the field of micro-nano machining, and the central idea is ultra-high precision maskless laser direct engraving. Because a word called "lithography" is used in the article, it is directly translated into the meaning of lithography. Coupled with the numerical value of 5nm, it is easy to think that the Chinese Academy of Sciences has made a breakthrough in the 5nm mask aligner. Due to some self-media translation errors and the desire to incite public sentiment to get a lot of traffic, this erroneous message was widely spread and forwarded, misleading many friends who care about the development of mask aligner in China.
Thesis and complete commercialization are two different things. In fact, even if the paper is really a breakthrough in the field of mask aligner, it is not easy to achieve full commercialization. Some time ago, the concept of "carbon-based chip" was also searched for a while. Carbon-based chips have the advantages of lower cost, lower power consumption and higher efficiency, and may be used in our mobile phones or computer chips in the future. Why didn't the heat last? The main reason is that its commercialization is far away. Carbon-based chips are still in the laboratory stage, and it will take at least 20 years to be fully commercialized, which means that they are not competitive with mainstream silicon-based chips. In the same way, even if the paper of Chinese Academy of Sciences is about 5nm mask aligner technology, I don't know how long it will take to realize full commercialization.
The gap between China and ASML in the Netherlands is at least ten years. At present, the best mask aligner manufacturer in China should be Shanghai Microelectronics, and the best mask aligner has only 90nm technology. Although there are rumors that Shanghai Microelectronics will launch a brand-new 28 nm mask aligner next year, there is still a big gap in accuracy with ASML's EUV mask aligner. The biggest difficulty in producing 5nm mask aligner in China is independent research and development. This not only means that we need to cross the huge obstacles from 28nm to 5nm, but also it is best not to use patents from other countries in the process of breakthrough, so we can only develop our own road to mask aligner. So many conditions need to be met, and the difficulty of research and development can be imagined. Generally speaking, the probability of a major breakthrough in China mask aligner technology in a short period of time is zero, and people still have to lead us by the nose. It's true at any time. If you fall behind, you will be beaten and stuck in the neck. I only hope that the researchers in our country can catch up and make a breakthrough at an early date.