China's most senior semiconductor executives issued a public call this week for a consolidated national effort to build a domestic alternative to Dutch lithography giant ASML, warning that the country's chip equipment industry remains too "small, fragmented, and weak" to overcome U.S. export restrictions on its own.

In remarks co-authored by SMIC co-founder Wang Yangyuan alongside leaders of memory giant YMTC, chip equipment maker Naura, and EDA software developer Empyrean, three specific areas where U.S. export controls have choked China's semiconductor ambitions were identified: electronic design automation software, silicon wafers, and manufacturing equipment — particularly extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, which enables the sub-7nm chip production that China currently cannot replicate.

As reported by the South China Morning Post, the authors urged the industry to "abandon illusions and prepare for struggle," and argued that fragmented public funding was dispersing resources across too many competing efforts without producing results.

China is currently drafting its 15th Five-Year Plan, which is set to be revealed to the National People’s Congress within the next week and covers 2026 to 2030. It’s widely expected that this iteration of the plan will prioritize lithography breakthroughs and EDA tool development as national targets. Big Fund III, a state-backed vehicle with roughly $47.5 billion earmarked for semiconductors, has already redirected fresh capital toward lithography and EDA as substitutes for ASML and Synopsys tools, respectively.

The sheer candor about fragmentation from this collection of executives is difficult to ignore, however, given just how often we see big, bold tech claims coming from Chinese media, but it aligns with an increasingly obvious challenge. China's most advanced domestically produced DUV lithography system, from Yuliangsheng, is technically comparable to ASML's Twinscan NXT:1950i — a machine ASML originally designed for 32nm-class processes back in 2008.

Even if SMIC manages to integrate that tool into a 28nm process by 2027, reaching sub-10nm would require redesigned scanners and several additional years of development. A prototype EUV machine has reportedly been completed in a Shenzhen lab, but EUV's commercial viability requires solving yield challenges that took ASML nearly two decades to overcome after its own prototype.

That’s all before we’ve even considered ASML’s accumulated know-how as, in Yangyuan’s words, “merely the integrator.” The company’s EUV dominance rests on a supply chain of more than 5,000 subcontractors, along with decades of high-volume manufacturing data. No amount of reverse engineering can quickly replicate that. While it’s true that Chinese firms have made real gains in adjacent equipment categories — Naura, for example, is one of the world’s top ten semi equipment vendors by revenue — lithography remains well out of reach.

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Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist.  Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.