Canon hopes to start shipments of new low-cost chip-making machines as early as this year, as the Japanese company best known for its cameras and printers tries to undercut longtime industry leader ASML in providing the tools to make leading-edge semiconductors.
The challenge from Canon comes as Western governments attempt to restrict China’s access to the most advanced semiconductor technologies and as global demand for chipmaking machines has soared. If successful, Canon’s “nanoimprint” technology could give back Japanese manufacturers some of the edge they ceded to rivals in South Korea, Taiwan and, increasingly, China over the past three decades.
“We would like to start shipping this year or next year... we want to do it while the market is hot,” said Hiroaki Takeishi, head of Canon’s industrial group, who has overseen the development of the new lithography machines. “It is a very unique technology that will enable cutting-edge chips to be made simply and at a low cost.”
First unveiled in mid-October, Canon’s nanoimprint lithography—a technology under development for more than 15 years but which the company says is only now commercially viable—stamps chip designs onto silicon wafers rather than etching them using light.
The process, says Canon, will be “one digit” cheaper and use up to 90 percent less power than Netherlands-based ASML’s market-dominating and light-based extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology.
Competitors have been progressively outflanked by ASML, the only group able to make the highly sophisticated EUV machines vital to the production of the latest generations of chips at manufacturers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Samsung Electronics in South Korea, and Intel in the US.
But the machines made by the Dutch tech company are also the most expensive part of the manufacturing process, costing more than $150 million each, and there are long lead times for delivery, giving Canon some space to market its technology.