China is on track to achieve basic self-sufficiency in building chipmaking equipment by this summer, reports the South China Morning Post. The publication cites Gerald Yin Zhiyao, chief executive of Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment China (AMEC), a China-based maker of wafer fab equipment (WFE).
Chip fabs are equipped with thousands of tools and machinery, and they are usually made in the Netherlands, the U.S., Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. However, these countries recently restricted the shipments of tools necessary to make chips on advanced nodes to China. Hence, the country accelerated its efforts to build its own supply chain for chipmaking equipment. While this supply chain is not yet world-class, and the tools can only be used to make chips on basic process technologies, it is about to become a reality, according to Gerald Yin Zhiyao, who formerly worked at Intel, Lam Research, and Applied Materials.
