India, Aug. 2 -- China's DUV breakthrough challenges export controls, reshaping global semiconductor competition.

In the summer of 2002, at a workshop convened by SEMATECH to plan the industry's move to 157 nanometre lithography, an engineer from TSMC named Burn-Jeng Lin stood up and argued that the road everyone had agreed upon was a dead end. Put a thin layer of water between the lens and the silicon wafer, he said, and the existing 193 nanometre light would do better than the new 157 nanometre machines ever could, because water bends light; its refractive index at that wavelength is 1.44. Intel abandoned 157 nanometre in May 2003. In December 2003, ASML announced the first immersion lithography system, the TWINSCAN XT:1250i, delivered...