ASML are not the chokepoint for chips. Zeiss are. ASML can hire more engineers and build more machines. Zeiss cannot hire more mirror grinders. And noone wants to train as one.
Is it all still manual?
ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
111–120 of 251 posts
Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
#112Is the ASML machine actually the world's most complex machine under some metric, or is this a claim that someone made up? I.e., did someone actually compare the ASML machine to the Space Shuttle, LHC, Internet, and so forth and show that it is more complex under some definition? (I've done various historical questions, so I'm sensitive to how statements are sourced.) An orthogonal question is what makes sense as a me…
Or more complex than, you know, one of the CPUs it can produce, with four billion transistors, which is not "mostly the same thing repeated"? Off topic: Does it blow anyone else's mind that a DRAM chip has more transistors on it than there are humans on the planet?
I mean, your brain has an order of magnitude more neurons than there are people on the planet. I think humans are just incapable of wrapping our heads around the sheer number of tiny things that fit in small macroscopic spaces.
Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
#113> By betting on extreme ultraviolet lithography long before it worked, ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips. Makes one wonder: Would we be much better off of worse off if we reshaped society to do more of things, where a new technology is unlikely to work but highly beneficial in the limits? Would we sooner have 10 additional ASMLs or waste a lot of resources?
Big gambles have big risks. It's the gambler's folly, after a big win (ASML's EUV) to say, gee, we should have bought more lottery tickets! Next time, it all goes on red! What is no longer mentioned is that ASML made another big gamble at the time they started on EUV. They decided to make an all-in-one chip making machine that took silicon and output chips (instead of matrices of chip circuits laid out on a wafer). O…
Let's not forget the really big gamble (inventing EUV) was made in the 1990s by US national labs: Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, and Lawrence Berkeley.
Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
#114Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
#115On a tangent and out of curiosity: The image of "The electromagnetic spectrum" shows "London radio waves" on the far right (i.e. longest wavelengths). Is this the correct term? Why do these long radio waves have the name "London"? Unfortunately all that I get googling the term is a guide to local FM station frequencies.
I think it's an error. Should be long-wave (LW), as opposed to medium- and short-wave.
Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has never happened in the history of the world that a company or country could maintain its technological advance indefinitely. Either China will catch up on this or that particular technology will become obsolete. But it is certain that they won't stay behind forever (measured in a small number of decades at most).
This is kind of like saying you can prove everyone dies based on the evidence that everyone who is not currently alive has died. You might place an upper limit using history but in this case I'd guess that limit would end up being much larger than the present semiconductor industry itself might last.
I'd say it is more likely than within 20 years the domestic Chinese semiconductor industry will be state-of-the-art across the full vertical and horizontal range.
There is a level of arrogance in the West that China does cheap but simple/low quality whereas this is only a stepping stone along the way. German car manufacturers went into China during the 90s with that mindset, and expecting it was forever, well they don't think that anymore...
Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> NASA says the Space Shuttle has 2.5 million moving parts, while the article says the ASML machine has over 100,000 components. I don’t know that many people would classify the Space Shuttle as a machine. It doesn’t make anything.
Why do machines have to "make" things? Is a car not a machine?
I've been reading Dashiell Hammett detective stories from the early 1920s and it seems like cars were almost exclusively referred to colloquially as 'machines' back then.
Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
#118Is the ASML machine actually the world's most complex machine under some metric, or is this a claim that someone made up? I.e., did someone actually compare the ASML machine to the Space Shuttle, LHC, Internet, and so forth and show that it is more complex under some definition? (I've done various historical questions, so I'm sensitive to how statements are sourced.) An orthogonal question is what makes sense as a me…
2.5 million moving parts sounds unlikely. Parts, sure. Moving parts, I’m skeptical.
Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
#119Is the ASML machine actually the world's most complex machine under some metric, or is this a claim that someone made up? I.e., did someone actually compare the ASML machine to the Space Shuttle, LHC, Internet, and so forth and show that it is more complex under some definition? (I've done various historical questions, so I'm sensitive to how statements are sourced.) An orthogonal question is what makes sense as a me…
2.5 million moving parts sounds unlikely. Parts, sure. Moving parts, I’m skeptical.
In a vehicle, all the parts are moving
Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
#120one thing not mentioned is how China is using the older tech DUV's to print advanced chips since replicating EUVs is close to impossible.
If ASML could do it, China will also do it. It's just a matter of development time and resources, both of which are plentiful in China.