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ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

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Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#131

Post by wahern »

rigonkulous wrote: post #79
wahern wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article might disagree. See the subsection, "The importance of tacit knowledge". OTOH, if that tacit knowledge is indeed so critical then there's less risk (e.g. regarding future investment incentives) to narrowing patent protections. OTOOH, ASML's supply chain is deep and complex, and the patent portfolio is presumably similarly diffuse, which makes it difficult to analyze or even, short of a complete patent reg…

ASML's supply chain is deep and complex - and secret . But if it were F/OSS (just imagine it) from sand to chip, that complexity would have a wider scope of human attention applied to it. What is happening with ASML now, once happened with the wheel. Think about that .

Patents are supposed to be the antidote to industrial secrets. Of course, it doesn't really work out that way because in addition to patent writers hiding the ball or strategically layering patents and secrecy, things like tacit knowledge and organization play a huge role in exploring, building, and applying solutions. FOSS doesn't really help with the tacit stuff. It's partly why it's so difficult for projects to survive after the original authors move on. With software that's not necessarily immediately fatal as long as the software works well and is easy enough to tweak around the edges to keep it compiling and interfacing well, qualities which FOSS is meant to foster and preserve. But outside software, and especially in the industrial sphere, the loss of that tacit knowledge and organization is often immediately fatal. You can't just copy stuff, you have to rebuild all that tacit knowledge and process. Often times, like in software, the resulting product that nominally achieves the same results is built around an entirely different technical approach.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#132

Post by robotresearcher »

kens wrote: post #128
robotresearcher wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2.5 million moving parts sounds unlikely. Parts, sure. Moving parts, I’m skeptical.

That claim is from NASA: https://www3.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/pdf/566250main_SHUTTLE...

I see that. And I see it repeated all over. Still skeptical.

Googling for total part count also comes up with the 2.5M number. They move WRT Earth, but the vast majority do not move with respect to each other, is my guess.

For a sanity check comparison: Saturn V estimates are ~5 million total parts, and "tens of thousands" of moving parts. A ratio that sounds sort of normal.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#133

Post by quanto »

I have an interesting discussion with a senior colleague: why ASML? why are they by far the best? Their competitors are a few generations behind.

The colleague claimed that there is no special magic. It's not that ASML is using some otherwise unknown laws of physics nor is any single step or component particularly special or novel. It's just that they meticulously optimized each step, and the sum of such steps is the winning solution.

In fact, this is probably why it's so hard to copy ASML. If there was a single magic component, a single or few engineers could be poached away to a competitor to copy it. However, copying a well-optimized company with many simultaneous optima is a much harder task.

Our discussion was in the context of why our quant hedgefund competitor was performing so well, far above the market norm. By nature and design, quant finance is an incredibly efficient field (and most techniques are more or less known by veterans), and we had thought unlikely that one fund could do so much better. Our conclusion was that this fund must be the well-optimized ASML of our field. My colleague happened to know the founder and indeed that was his personal impression as well.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#134

Post by tedggh »

warmjets222 wrote: post #117
fl4regun wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Steel machines of hell. That’s how I saw them in an editorial work dating back to the early 1900’s talking about the arrival of cars in the city.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#135

Post by tim333 »

quanto wrote: post #133

I have an interesting discussion with a senior colleague: why ASML? why are they by far the best? Their competitors are a few generations behind. The colleague claimed that there is no special magic. It's not that ASML is using some otherwise unknown laws of physics nor is any single step or component particularly special or novel. It's just that they meticulously optimized each step, and the sum of such steps is the…

ASLM have put massive financial investment into getting where they are including raising money from customers like Intel in return for shares. Also, form wikipedia "employs more than 42,000 people.. and relies on a network of nearly 5,000 tier 1 suppliers". It's going to be a lot of time and money to match that.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#136

Post by sbarre »

moffkalast wrote: post #34
sbarre wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bigger chips = more distance to cover for your electrons = more power required = more generated heat = slower throughput for your data. Surely you don't believe that the entire chip industry had not thought of "wait what if we just make the chips bigger".

AMD hiding Threadripper behind their back: Uh yeah what a terrible idea, we definitely didn't actually do that. Making a CPU that's twice the size, how ridiculous would that be right?!

You found an exception to my two-line generalization. Congrats!

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#138

Post by ordu »

kens wrote: post #82

Is 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…

> An orthogonal question is what makes sense as a measure of complexity.

I don't know, but number of parts doesn't seem good. I feel that complexity should be measured in bits, but how to tie it with something real idk. Maybe the amount of knowledge needed to reproduce the machine? It is hard to measure though, because knowledge in people heads can't me measured precisely, we can estimate it but it will be a very rough estimate.

But the knowledge by itself is not enough, because there difficulties when producing that pure knowledge can't solve, they need a specialized equipment or source materials, and arguably it adds to a complexity too.

Or we can try from completely different angle, how about the reaction of a machine to small perturbations? Like if I unscrew this bolt, how long it will take for a machine to explode? xD

I mean, I'm not an engineer really, but I have experience as a software developer, and subjectively complexity of a code is when you can't predict at all what will happen if you change this line of code. Maybe it can be taken as a basis for a measure?

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#140

Post by rufo »

kens wrote: post #82

Is 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…

I just watched the Vertasium video[1] on ASML's EUV lithgoraphy machines over the weekend, and I think the qualifier they used was "most complex machine _you can purchase commercially_".

I can't remember if it was an ASML representative that said that, or if it was an overlaid asterisk that popped up on the screen at some point - but I definitely remember thinking about the space shuttle and Saturn V/Apollo and those sorts of things before I saw the qualifier.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0

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