The state-owned company at the centre of China’s newest chipmaking push finally has a name. Reuters reported on Tuesday that Shanghai Aishengna Electronic Technology Group, a little-known state-owned group, is leading the effort to mass-produce domestically developed immersion deep-ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines, according to a person familiar with the matter who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject.
The company is said to have built its programme by absorbing teams from several of China’s top lithography startups.
The Information first reported on Monday that an unidentified state-backed Shanghai firm had begun manufacturing the machines, and the news alone was enough to send ASML shares down more than 8% at one point on Monday.
Reuters is the first to attach a name to the company, which matters because immersion DUV is a corner of the market ASML has dominated for years, and because Beijing’s push to build it at home is a direct response to the export controls that have kept the Dutch firm’s best tools out of China.
Aishengna itself is obscure, and Reuters’s description of it hoovering up staff from established ventures fits a familiar pattern in China’s chip drive, where the state stitches scattered efforts into a single national champion.
Earlier coverage of China’s DUV progress had pointed to a different Shanghai firm, Yuliangsheng, whose scanner SMIC was said to be testing last year, and which may be one of the teams now folded into the effort.
It helps to be clear about what the machine does. Deep-ultraviolet lithography is the tool that prints circuit patterns onto silicon, and the immersion variant slips a thin layer of water between the lens and the wafer so it can etch finer features.
It sits a generation behind extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, the far more advanced technology that ASML alone produces and that China has been blocked from buying. DUV cannot match EUV on the most cutting-edge chips, but paired with a technique called multi-patterning it can still reach fairly advanced nodes, which is how SMIC has been able to turn out 7nm processors without any EUV at all. Multi-patterning is slower, costlier, and tends to lower yields, so it is a workaround rather than a substitute.
The caveats are heavy, and Reuters’s source stressed them. Aishengna’s machine is expected to need further testing and remains far from matching ASML’s competing models, so it poses no immediate commercial threat to a company that still supplies most of the world’s advanced lithography.
This is a source-based account rather than an official one, and none of the companies involved have confirmed it on the record.
What a homegrown line would buy China, if it works, is insurance. Domestic DUV would give the country’s chipmakers an alternative source of equipment should Western governments tighten the rules further, whether by restricting exports outright or by cutting off the servicing that keeps existing foreign machines running.
The Information, citing two people, said the first units are due to be delivered this year to leading Chinese manufacturers including SMIC, Hua Hong Semiconductor, and the memory-chip maker ChangXin Memory Technologies.
China’s drive toward domestic silicon has already reshaped how it designs AI chips, and lithography is the harder, more strategic frontier.
For Beijing the symbolism is considerable, since semiconductor self-sufficiency is one of Xi Jinping’s highest priorities and lithography has been the most stubborn gap in the country’s supply chain.
ASML, whose stock has since steadied, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and neither did SMIC, Hua Hong, or CXMT.
