Photolithography is the core equipment for the production of large-scale integrated circuits, and is the basis for the manufacture and maintenance of the optical and electronic industries. The principle of photolithography is to project the high precision negative backing onto the crystal original, for such cutting-edge technology, it is reasonable to say that those chip powerhouses should be the manufacturing powerhouse of photolithography, but to everyone's surprise, the world's best photolithography is not from the U.S., but from the Netherlands.
While the U.S. is a high-tech developed country and has its own photolithography machines that it buys, it doesn't have its own photolithography machine manufacturing companies. Currently can manufacture high-end lithography only the Netherlands ASML (lens from Germany), Japan Nikon (intel once bought Nikon's high-end lithography) and Japan Canon three major brands mainly.
On the one hand, photolithography is a highly sophisticated technology, its technical difficulty is globally recognized, if there is no sustained strong investment in research and development simply can not be manufactured. An advanced lithography machine can have more than 50,000 parts, design and production is not easy. Photolithography machine has two synchronized movement of the workpiece table, one carries the negative, one carries the film. Both need to be synchronized at all times with an error of less than 2 nanometers. The acceleration of the two tables from static to dynamic is similar to a missile launch.
On the other hand, the production of photolithography on the comprehensive requirements of technology is very high, which involves a lot of technical areas, photolithography is the most difficult lies in the precision, just imagine, a nail so big chip, to integrate tens of billions of transistors, just imagine how complex the internal structure of photolithography to manufacture chips, the accuracy of each component inside the precision of the requirements of how high the precision.