U.S. trade curbs spur China business for Japan chip industry

TOKYO -- Japan's semiconductor equipment makers are enjoying strong demand from China, in part due to trade controls imposed by Washington and to Beijing stepping up efforts to boost the local chip industry.

"In China, there's demand for securing legacy generation chips in mass, as advanced chips cannot be exported to the country," Masato Goto, president of Screen Semiconductor Solutions told Nikkei Asia. The company, a unit of Japan's Screen Holdings, is a major supplier of machines used, among other things, for washing chip wafers to remove minuscule metal pieces. These pieces can be as small as 0.1 micrometer, or one ten-thousandth of a millimeter.