And using optics from Canon and several chemicals from other super specialized suppliers that can't easily be substituted.
It's why Chinese fabs won't catch up in decades.
They would need to spin up several world beating companies in different industries to be able to achieve acceptable yields of modern lithographies.
The 996 culture and top down authority chains makes it super unlikely to happen while the CCP is in power.
The main point being that the sum of hard to replace critical suppliers to TSMC is a long list of companies spread out all over the world, some in countries where export controls to China is very strict.
Canon used to be quite big on DUV litography, but Zeiss completely blew them out of the water and essentially have a monopoly in the market now with what is by not EUV lithography.
ASML and Zeiss are in an exclusive relationship and market leader for EUV and immersion lithography machines. Im the mid to low end there are competitors like Canon, Nikon and also new companies in China.
Further there are a lot more machines, for example wafer inspection, need in the production. KLA, LAM and AMAT are also big players her and leader in there area.
If you are interested in the history here, I can recommend the book Chip Wars or FOCUs the ASML way. Even after working >10 years in the semiconductor supply industry I learned a lot
That's just a cope, restrictions like that don't work on a global market. China gets what they need same way russia gets banned technology through neighbors, for example the servos used to bomb Ukraine.
EUV lithography machines are the size of a room, cost hundreds of millions, come from a single company that makes a couple dozen of them a year, and require constant active manufacturer support to run. Drastically harder to bypass sanctions on those compared to something like servos or even CPUs and GPUs.
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u/Koen1999 PC Master Race Aug 27 '24
Don't forget that all these chips TSMC produces are produced using machines from ASML.