Due to the high demand for the commodity from Chinese chip fabless and foundry businesses, the shortage of photomasks is continuing despite the fact that the world economy is experiencing a slump
Toppan, Photronics, and Dai Nippon Printing are all maintaining factory operation rates of one hundred percent, according to sources
Quartz blank masks serve as the foundation for the creation of photomasks, which are then adorned with circuit designs. They are comparable to film that is used in film cameras
Photomask patterns are lithographed onto wafers. This ultraviolet technique requires dozens of sets of photomasks
Another factor that contributed to the worsening of the photomask scarcity was the introduction of the DUV 7nm process by the Chinese foundry SMIC
Rise in the number of companies that manufacture artificial intelligence chips is another factor that was prompted by the success of ChatGPT