Former ASML head scientist Lin Nan drives China’s latest EUV breakthrough

Research team achieves world-class results in photolithography research with solid-state laser-driven approach, paper shows

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Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machines are critical for producing the advanced chips that drive hi-tech industries. Illustration: Getty

Published: 6:00am, 29 Apr 2025Updated: 3:21pm, 12 May 2025

Chinese researchers have cracked a barrier to the home-grown production of advanced chips by building an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light source platform that operates at internationally competitive parameters, according to a research paper.

The team, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, was led by Lin Nan, previously research scientist at ASML in the Netherlands and also its competence owner of light sources for metrology.

ASML, the world’s only manufacturer of EUV machines – which are critical for producing chips with nodes below seven nanometres – has been prohibited from selling its most advanced models to China since 2019, thanks to pressure from the US.

In a call to investors on April 16, ASML chief executive Christophe Fouquet said that it was “always possible to generate some EUV light, but it would take many, many years for China to make an EUV machine”.

Lin returned to China in 2021 as part of the country’s overseas high-level recruitment drive and founded the advanced photolithography technology research group that was responsible for the paper.

Before joining ASML, Lin was mentored by Anne L’Huillier, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for physics and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, as part of a scholarship awarded by the European Union’s Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions programme.