Tech made in Europe; the machine that makes the machines. Today, the WSJ calls it the “Most Indispensable Machine in the World” as ASML alone makes the machines that can manufacture advanced chips for Apple, NVIDIA, Intel etc.
https://i.redd.it/gvdgfvryo5be1.jpeg
by EUstrongerthanUS
18 comments
EUV Lithography machine btw. Super interesting stuff.
Just finished [Chip War, by Chris Miller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_War:_The_Fight_for_the_World%27s_Most_Critical_Technology). I highly recommend it if you are interested in the economics of silicon chips.
Although the highly complex machine is produced by ASML, it requires highly complex tools produced by other companies from Germany, USA or Japan. It also requires software produced by american firms. The main clients of ASML are in Taiwan and South Korea.
The logistics behind silicon chips is so global, that it is quite difficult to state that one region could dominate the industry.
It’s a process that involves vaporizing droplets of molten tin and producing light that doesn’t occur naturally on Earth.
Or at least that’s the simplest way to understand the the extremely intricate science of extreme ultraviolet lithography.
The droplets get zapped by twin laser pulses—explosions that happen 50,000 times a second. The first pulse flattens them. The second one obliterates them into a plasma that emits the EUV light. That light is then collected using the smoothest mirrors ever invented and directed toward the silicon wafer to etch billions of microscopic transistor patterns.
The existential question of the semiconductor industry is how to pack more and more of those transistors on chips to make them faster and faster. The answer: shorter and shorter wavelengths of light. ASML’s first lithography tools created light at wavelengths of 436 nanometers. The current machines have shrunk that number to 13.5 nanometers. That allows them to fabricate chips at resolutions 10,000 times finer than human hair.
ASML teamed up with a German optical company to develop mirrors so flat that if they were scaled up to the size of Germany itself, their largest imperfection would be less than a millimeter.
The precision of EUV machines is comparable to directing a laser beam from your house and hitting a ping-pong ball on the moon.
Apple and Nvidia both design their own chips and outsource production to the fabs of TSMC, which means ASML’s tech is pivotal for making everything from AI data centers to iPhones.
EUV machines have become so crucial that the company now employs an army of 10,000 customer-support employees to keep them humming.
“They are the front-line troops of ASML,” said Jim Koonmen, the company’s chief customer officer.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/asml-euv-machine-lithography-chips-967954d0
Doesn’t ASML just make machines that are just part of the chip production pipeline?
What does one cost?
ASML is becoming a meme… It’s the only goto answer when some points to the non existing tech industry in Europe.
As a completely unscientific explaination why their tech is so insane is that they have somehow figured litographic equivalent of out how to drill a 3mm hole with a 4mm drill. It shouldn’t be possible, but somehow they did it.
The width of the traces their machines produce can be measured in _atoms_.
That is the problem with capitalism: missing redundancy. I remember the time when Taiwan was hit by a natural disaster and the three most important HDD manufacturers went offline. The price increase was huge.
*Based on license granted by the US Department of Energy who originally [granted ASML permission to participate in EUV development](https://www.eetimes.com/u-s-gives-ok-to-asml-on-euv-effort/). Because the DOE retains IP control of the EUV, the US can control who ASML can export to.
Go on Trump, slap some tariffs on it, see what happens.
I am surprised Donald Trump has not threatened to annex Veldhoven yet.
“I got a rare look at the one tool responsible for all the tech in your life. It’s made by a company you’ve never heard of.”
ASML is a household name in the Netherlands and widely recognized among technology experts worldwide. It’s safe to assume that even Elon Musk is well aware of ASML, perhaps even harboring ambitions to acquire and exploit it. Good to know for everybody, it’s not for sale and it will never be sold.
This assumption, however, reflects a distinctly American tendency to view the world through a self-centered lens, as though everything revolves around them. Reality, of course, is far more nuanced.
It’s one of the reasons why my house got expensive, along with all other housing in a 30 kilometer radius.
So yeah, we’re proud of ASML but it’s somewhat annoying when they buy up a whole street to secure housing for their employees.
How close to an STC is this?
And that machine might stop producing for the US if President Musk and Trum continue with their crazy antics.
Friend of mine works for them, I don;t think he will have to wory about job security until he retires in 40 years. They are backlogged for like a decade now
Suddenly europeans are so proud of big tech when its about ASML…
Why not get a European-based chip manufacturer going and then we can control the entire process, “from field to table” so to speak. That would shield us massively against global destabilisation from potential events in Taiwan and the US.
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