(Yicai Global) Jan. 20 -- The roughly USD10 million worth of used lithography machinery Suzhou Crystal Clear Chemical bought four months ago to produce semiconductors has arrived, the company announced yesterday. Crystal Clear's shares [SHE:300655] closed 6.93 percent up at CNY36.67 (USD5.64) at the lunch break on the news.

The Chinese producer of chemical materials for the electronics industry announced the purchase of the argon fluoride laser equipment made by Netherlands-based ASM International from South Korea’s SK Hynix through Singapore-based electrical wholesaler Singtest Technology for USD11 million on Sept. 29, saying the purchase will push its research and development of high-end products. Its shares hit the Shenzhen bourse’s ChiNext Index’s 20 percent up limit the next day. 

Lithography machines are key equipment for chip manufacturing. 

"The equipment's installation project is set to end in the first half, and we are expected to finish technical specification related to the new technique of ArF photoresist products, finalize the products, and realize large-scale production in three years," Shanghai Securities News reported yesterday, citing the firm’s Chairman Wu Tianshu. China-made photoresist will be able to basically meet the requirements of 45 nanometer to 28nm process technology and manufacturing techniques with the industrialization of the ArF photoresist, Wu said. 

The costs of the deal include the equipment purchase price, commissions, taxes and fees incurred in transferring its title, the firm said in September. 

Photoresist is light-sensitive liquid made up of a photosensitive resin, sensitizer and solvent that uses a photochemical reaction to transfer a fine pattern onto a substrate via exposure by ultraviolet light, electron beam, excimer laser beam, X-ray or ion beam.

It mainly includes printed circuit board chemicals and those for liquid crystal displays and semiconductors. World chip technology is now at the micro-nano level, with an ultraviolet wavelength. Japan and the US essentially monopolize the core technologies of these two types of photoresists.

Veldhoven, Netherlands-based ASML Holding makes machinery used to produce integrated circuits. It is the world's biggest supplier of photolithography equipment to the semiconductor sector. Icheon-si-based Hynix is a memory semiconductor supplier of dynamic random-access memory chips and flash memory chips. It is the globe's second-biggest memory chipmaker and the world's third-largest microprocessor producer.

Editor: Ben Armour, Xiao Yi