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ASML Q4 2022 financial results

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Re: ASML Q4 2022 financial results

#61

Post by tooltalk »

eric-hu wrote: post #41
foota wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't aware that South Korea was such a big player in the chip industry. Is this for compute or something else?

Samsung was a bigger foundry than TSMC until the 2010’s when Apple provided TSMC with billions in interest free loans in exchange for getting first dibs on new fab processes.

Samsung's custom foundry started sometime in 2000's with Apple as their anchor client. TSMC really singlehandledly created the custom foundry industry in the late 1980's and is the largest by far. TSMC has always been the market leader -- though it had local competitors like UMC in Taiwan -- and Samsung the late comer. Samsung managed to come out with the first 14nm ahead of TSMC's 16nm in 2012 and made all Apple's A SOCs in Austin, TX, but Apple went ahead and outsourced everything to TSMC in Taiwan in their China/Taiwan-first strategy anyway; this is in spite of TSMC's higher cost and marginal performance difference.

Re: ASML Q4 2022 financial results

#62

Post by bradknowles »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #52
nwiswell wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the design of those proprietary parts is very technical, but the manufacturing not so much. That's part of what makes the IP situation so tenuous and is a big part of why the FBI has aggressively prosecuted individuals for corporate espionage against WFE firms in the past.

The tolerances are very tight. Manufacturing must be difficult.

I worked a six month contract at ASML years ago. One of the most fascinating things was touring around the spaces with an experienced team leader, who explained a lot of their processes. Note that the below comes from my experience there prior to 2006. Nothing that I'm going to explain here is company proprietary information. Even if I had that, I wouldn't expose it.

Each top machine costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build. They are built by a dedicated team of people who only work on that one machine, and they take it from soup to nuts, including the installation in the field. They spend months taking measurements at the site before they ever start building the machine in the first place. Their placement of the machine and the measurements is very precise -- if the machine has to be moved by a centimeter in any direction from the original measurements taken, they have to basically start over from scratch.

The machine is completely built in clean room facilities at the HQ in Eindhoven, taken all the way to the point where it is used to do good size batches of test runs of known chip designs. Those clean rooms operate way beyond the cleanliness levels of a normal chip lithography clean room. They are some of the cleanest clean rooms in the world.

Once completed, the machine gets completely disassembled and shipped to the customer, along with the team who built it. Then they rebuild it on site. Once rebuilt, it will take months of running in and tweaking before it's able to be considered fully operational. That process alone can take over a year, if the team runs into more problems than typical.

The machines are so sensitive that a truck driving down the road ten miles away can affect the output and may cause the machine to be knocked out of calibration.

From the time of placing the order to the time when the machine is considered fully operational, multiple years have passed.

And that was way back before 2006, when my wife and I moved back here to the US. I had seen the door behind which all EUV design was done, but I never got a chance to see inside. It was locked up like Cheyenne Mountain. And yes, I did previously have a TOP SECRET/SCI clearance, and I've been briefed on exactly what the ANMCC and Cheyenne Mountain look like.

I have no idea how much more complex and sensitive the processes used by ASML have gotten since. I do believe the top machines now cost over a billion dollars, each.

Re: ASML Q4 2022 financial results

#63

Post by bradknowles »

rjzzleep wrote: post #55
markus_zhang wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 years is probably an underestimate given then current geopolitical condition.

Just last year people were commenting here on HN that China is years away from making anything under 14nm and that even that would be hard for them. Then we heard about China being years away from hypersonic missiles and how they couldn't even make fast memory chips. Then we were surprised not only have been making 7nm chips for a year already, they also make the fastest memory chips. Our response? Let's sanction the…

Note that China was actually one of the biggest customers for ASML, going back to 2006 and earlier.

The difference is that China didn't get the latest and greatest machines. Taiwan did, but not China.

But ASML definitely had sales people in China that were willing to do whatever it took to make the sale. Including giving hundreds of gigabytes of free pirate DVD rips to their prospective customers. Guess how long that took over the 2Mbps E-1 lines that the local offices in China had to get back to the HQ offices in Eindhoven, where those could then get out onto the public Internet? Guess who helped run that central mail system that was frequently flooded by all these DVD rips that were being sent by the sales people to their customers?

Re: ASML Q4 2022 financial results

#64

Post by seper8 »

nwiswell wrote: post #53
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tolerances are very tight. Manufacturing must be difficult.

Not really any harder than making an airplane. For older generations of tools, there are a lot of bootleg replacement parts floating around on secondary markets. When tools reach their end of life at leading-edge fabs, or when those fabs are shuttered, the tools are often sold off to trailing edge fabs in permissive jurisdictions with shoestring budgets. These fabs are not averse to buying whatever works cheapest, an…

>Not really any harder than making an airplane. Except the airplane still works if something is misaligned by 10NM...

Re: ASML Q4 2022 financial results

#65

Post by tooltalk »

bradknowles wrote: post #63
rjzzleep wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just last year people were commenting here on HN that China is years away from making anything under 14nm and that even that would be hard for them. Then we heard about China being years away from hypersonic missiles and how they couldn't even make fast memory chips. Then we were surprised not only have been making 7nm chips for a year already, they also make the fastest memory chips. Our response? Let's sanction the…

Note that China was actually one of the biggest customers for ASML, going back to 2006 and earlier. The difference is that China didn't get the latest and greatest machines. Taiwan did, but not China. But ASML definitely had sales people in China that were willing to do whatever it took to make the sale. Including giving hundreds of gigabytes of free pirate DVD rips to their prospective customers. Guess how long that…

>> Note that China was actually one of the biggest customers for ASML, going back to 2006 and earlier.

Why would you make such an absurd comment about ASML's 2006 sales? or perhaps you mean to say 2016?

  2006
  Korea 1,085,497 13,730 662
  United States 931,971 740,036 24,262
  Taiwan 739,432 16,058 483
  Rest of Asia 470,915 937,107 1,282
  Europe 369,289 2,145,710 166,415
  Total 3,597,104 3,852,641 193,10

  2016
  Taiwan 2,140.3 2,815.9
  Korea 1,594.3 28.7
  United States 1,087.5 4,200.6
  China 758.2 2.6
  Singapore 245.6 0.8
  Japan 415.1 4.6
  Rest of Asia 26.7 2.8
  Netherlands 1.1 2,737.9
  EMEA 606.3 2.5
China's share in chips was a paltry low-single figure until few years ago -- less than 5% of global chip sales, according to SIA's report in 2022, and that also had a lot to do with foreign chip makers (eg, Samsung's Xi'an plant which opened in 2019 accounts for 40% of their entire DRAM production).

Re: ASML Q4 2022 financial results

#66

Post by bradknowles »

tooltalk wrote: post #65
bradknowles wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that China was actually one of the biggest customers for ASML, going back to 2006 and earlier. The difference is that China didn't get the latest and greatest machines. Taiwan did, but not China. But ASML definitely had sales people in China that were willing to do whatever it took to make the sale. Including giving hundreds of gigabytes of free pirate DVD rips to their prospective customers. Guess how long that…

>> Note that China was actually one of the biggest customers for ASML, going back to 2006 and earlier. Why would you make such an absurd comment about ASML's 2006 sales? or perhaps you mean to say 2016? 2006 Korea 1,085,497 13,730 662 United States 931,971 740,036 24,262 Taiwan 739,432 16,058 483 Rest of Asia 470,915 937,107 1,282 Europe 369,289 2,145,710 166,415 Total 3,597,104 3,852,641 193,10 2016 Taiwan 2,140.3 2…

I know where the sales reps were, and where the customers were that they were selling to. Maybe those sales were to companies that weren't technically Chinese, even though they were operating in China. And so maybe the sales got reported for some other region.

China was huge business back then before 2006. Kept our E-1 lines quite flooded with all those pirated DVD images that they were sending by e-mail. But we did fix that problem. And I did get a nice little invited talk out of the work I did on their e-mail system.

And yes, I said 2006 and I meant 2006.

Re: ASML Q4 2022 financial results

#67

Post by pa7x1 »

karmasimida wrote: post #32
Fordec wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main company there is Zeiss in Germany that makes all the high grade optics. Part of the reason ASML is Dutch is it has access to the German precision manufacturing up-stream, quite literally.

ASML’s laser equipment is made mainly in US by Cymer

The lasers are made by Trumpf in Germany.

Re: ASML Q4 2022 financial results

#68

Post by yywwbbn »

pphysch wrote: post #54
yywwbbn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> overperformance What do you mean?

Growth, high tech innovation, etc. China has been on the verge of collapse since 1991, according to Western popular consciousness.

There is no need for exaggeration. But.. Well clearly the last couple of years were not great for China compared to 10 or so prior to covid.

Re: ASML Q4 2022 financial results

#69

Post by pphysch »

yywwbbn wrote: post #68
pphysch wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growth, high tech innovation, etc. China has been on the verge of collapse since 1991, according to Western popular consciousness.

There is no need for exaggeration. But.. Well clearly the last couple of years were not great for China compared to 10 or so prior to covid.

Based on which facts?

Re: ASML Q4 2022 financial results

#70

Post by nwiswell »

seper8 wrote: post #64
nwiswell wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really any harder than making an airplane. For older generations of tools, there are a lot of bootleg replacement parts floating around on secondary markets. When tools reach their end of life at leading-edge fabs, or when those fabs are shuttered, the tools are often sold off to trailing edge fabs in permissive jurisdictions with shoestring budgets. These fabs are not averse to buying whatever works cheapest, an…

>Not really any harder than making an airplane. Except the airplane still works if something is misaligned by 10NM...

That's adjusted dynamically during operation by interferometer controls, not in manufacturing. You'd get more than 10nm of misalignment just due to a couple degrees of temperature change.
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