Why can't India build an EUV lithography machine?

One company on Earth makes the machine that prints every advanced chip in use today: ASML, of the Netherlands. India runs no programme to build one, and its only integrated fab operates three decades behind the frontier.

Extreme ultraviolet lithography uses 13.5-nanometre light — generated by hitting droplets of tin with a laser to form a plasma — to print circuit patterns onto silicon wafers via a reflective photomask. Below the 7nm process node, the older deep-ultraviolet approach becomes prohibitively costly and hard to yield through repeated "multiple patterning". EUV is the only economical way through, and ASML is the only supplier capable of it in high-volume manufacturing.

The difficulty is hard to overstate. An EUV machine is among the most complicated devices ever built, integrating hundreds of thousands of components sourced from nearly 800 suppliers. Its mirrors — made by the German optics firm Zeiss, ASML's exclusive partner for over 30 years — are figured to an accuracy smaller than the diameter of a single silicon atom. The capability took a roughly 30-year race and about US$9 billion in research, built on a public-private effort that began with US national labs and a consortium in the 1990s. ASML shipped its first EUV production system in 2013; its first High-NA system arrived in December 2023, with high-volume use expected in 2025–2026. Each machine sells for more than $120 million. Experts say it could take decades for any other company to catch up.

India's position is unambiguous. The Semi-Conductor Laboratory (SCL) at Mohali — the country's only integrated device manufacturing facility, whose chips flew on the Mars Orbiter Mission — runs an 8-inch CMOS line at the 180nm node, using DUV at 248nm and MUV at 365nm. That is generations removed from EUV. As of 2025, India has no indigenous EUV capability and no programme to build one; all advanced lithography equipment is imported, a position of complete dependence on a single foreign supplier.

The gap persists because EUV sits atop a stack of foundational capabilities India has only begun to assemble. The tin-plasma light source and the EUV photoresist chemistry — the latter dominated by Japan — are absent domestically. Reflective photomasks and pellicles stable above 200 watts do not exist here. Precision optics, high-power CO2 lasers, and the ultra-high-vacuum nanometre-precision wafer stages are emerging at best. And EUV only earns its cost inside a leading-edge, sub-7nm fab — which India does not yet operate. Above all, EUV is the product of a specialised precision-engineering supplier ecosystem spanning hundreds of firms; that ecosystem, not any single machine, is what a nation must grow.

India's policy is now pointed at those foundations rather than at the machine itself. The Semiconductor Mission 2.0, announced in the Union Budget and launched with an initial outlay of ₹22,919 crore — later raised to about ₹40,000 crore — is expected to focus on semiconductor equipment and materials manufacturing, indigenous intellectual property, and full-stack design. It is deliberately an ecosystem strategy, not an EUV moonshot.

What building EUV would take is visible in the dependency chain: mastery of sub-atomic mirror figuring, a manufacturing-power tin-plasma source, resist and mask chemistry, vacuum motion systems, a leading-edge fab to justify the tool, and a domestic supplier base numbering in the hundreds. Each is a multi-year programme in its own right. Even the challenger with the most resources shows the timescale — a Chinese state-backed consortium coordinated by Huawei reportedly certified a functional EUV prototype in Shenzhen only in December 2025, after years of effort and alternative source research.

For India, the near-term climb is the layers beneath the machine, in the order they must come.