Page Reader AI | Former ASML head scientist Lin Nan drives China’s latest EUV breakthrough

Former ASML head scientist Lin Nan drives China’s latest EUV breakthrough | South China Morning Post

A team of Chinese researchers, led by a former ASML scientist, has made a significant breakthrough in developing a domestically produced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light source platform for advanced chip manufacturing.

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Chinese researchers have cracked a barrier to the home-grown production of advanced chips by building an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light source platform that operates at internationally competitive parameters, according to a research paper.

The team, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, was led by Lin Nan, previously head of light source technology at ASML in the Netherlands.

ASML, the world’s only manufacturer of EUV machines – which are critical for producing chips with nodes below seven nanometres – has been prohibited from selling its most advanced models to China since 2019, thanks to pressure from the US.

In a call to investors on April 16, ASML chief executive Christophe Fouquet said that it was “always possible to generate some EUV light, but it would take many, many years for China to make an EUV machine”.

Lin returned to China in 2021 as part of the country’s overseas high-level recruitment drive and founded the advanced photolithography technology research group that was responsible for the paper.

Before joining ASML, Lin was mentored by Anne L’Huillier, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for physics and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, as part of a scholarship awarded by the European Union’s Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions programme.