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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

#161

Post by joe_the_user »

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…

Technology can explain why ASML or other companies are dominant at a given moment but it can't explain how it became dominant. Essentially, technological superiority involves research and that requires money. IE, it is a product of investment in the various technologies.

The history of ASML involves a "failed" company that other multinationals felt they had to keep alive to allow the technologies to continue. And that's saying that the capital investment needed to produce a thing of that scale can't work if it is subject to a yearly profit cycle (or works much more poorly).

The further factor shaping ASML is that as chip technology has grown, the investment required for support technology has grown and so only a single supplier can remain profitable and it seem logical there would only be a single company acting as supplier (maintaining research and expertise in two or three huge companies, only one of which can be profitable at a time, is highly inefficient - why we're done down to 1-3 cutting edge chip makers at this point also).

So ASML was economically logical and it being in Europe is perhaps a combination of European tradition and Europe wanting some part of the global chip production system (which is by a fair bit the largest/most-valuable concentration of capital and technology in the world).

https://medium.com/@crcjeffkim/why-these-5-acquisitions-have...

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#162

Post by maccard »

quirkot wrote: post #148
random3 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Veritasium has a nice video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0 Obviously, there are a lot of reasons why. But it boils down to having the vision, the belief and the strength to follow through over many years. It's important to not confound vision with random Kool-Aid. Instead it's grounded in research. That research is itself grounded in a strong vision and belief — it got laughed by the entire phys…

> But it boils down to having the vision, the belief and the strength to follow through over many years And importantly, that vision being correct. The graveyard of history is full of the dedicated yet incorrect.

You can also have the right vision but at the wrong time.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#163

Post by EtienneK »

rgalate wrote: post #151
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…

The best explanation as to why ASML is so dominant is that they have locked out the best suppliers by signing exclusivity deals with them. If you want to compete with ASML you have to vertically build: the best lenses, the best lasers, the best metrology. A new entrant would need to replace ten different world-class vendors simultaneously. Unlike common business wisdom that dictates having multiple suppliers to mitig…

Carl Zeiss only has a €2.2B market cap. What stops someone from just buying all these world class vendors?

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#164

Post by CGMthrowaway »

EtienneK wrote: post #163
rgalate wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best explanation as to why ASML is so dominant is that they have locked out the best suppliers by signing exclusivity deals with them. If you want to compete with ASML you have to vertically build: the best lenses, the best lasers, the best metrology. A new entrant would need to replace ten different world-class vendors simultaneously. Unlike common business wisdom that dictates having multiple suppliers to mitig…

Carl Zeiss only has a €2.2B market cap. What stops someone from just buying all these world class vendors?

Carl Zeiss Meditec /= Carl Zeiss. $AFX is the publicly traded non-semis division. Carl Zeiss AG is the parent company which is private

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#165

Post by KK7NIL »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #155
bobbruno wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue that NVidia's advantage comes from a similar vision epiphany that led to them developing CUDA years before it was viable. The result is similar.

I'm tempted to call that pure luck. As far as they knew, crypto would be the killer app. However, if you start with the assumption that at some point, people are going to need a lot of fast parallel compute for something , you could rationally justify their long-term strategy. They skated where the proverbial puck was going. They couldn't see the puck, but they were pretty sure there was one. In hindsight that really…

Nvidia subsidized machine learning research for years (both with CUDA, hardware donations and developing what was a very niche product line just for them) before deep learning became big, much less the advent of LLMs.

Certainly Jensen seemed to have an extremely long view on this burgeoning machine learning market in the early 2010's.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#166

Post by dist-epoch »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #155
bobbruno wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue that NVidia's advantage comes from a similar vision epiphany that led to them developing CUDA years before it was viable. The result is similar.

I'm tempted to call that pure luck. As far as they knew, crypto would be the killer app. However, if you start with the assumption that at some point, people are going to need a lot of fast parallel compute for something , you could rationally justify their long-term strategy. They skated where the proverbial puck was going. They couldn't see the puck, but they were pretty sure there was one. In hindsight that really…

People were (ab)using OpenGL to run compute on GPUs in 2004-2006, doing stuff like rendering 2 triangles covering the whole screen and then doing the actual compute in the pixel shaders, getting 10x speedups over CPUs for some problems.

NVIDIA just had their eyes open to an obvious market demand and made it easier by creating CUDA.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#167

Post by nicoburns »

throw0101c wrote: post #53
maxalbarello wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i find it hard to believe that there is no equivalent anywhere else in the world. there is so much talent out there and the stakes are so high that it seems like an inevitability. whatever many secrets are involved, information wants to be free and it's hard to believe that others won't figure it out. by the time they do catch up we better be steps ahead. what's after EUV?

> i find it hard to believe that there is no equivalent anywhere else in the world. there is so much talent out there and the stakes are so high that it seems like an inevitability. Well, even jet engine manufacturing is something that China is behind in (relatively speaking), and it (seems?) is simpler than some of the stuff in EUV machines.

> and it (seems?) is simpler than some of the stuff in EUV machines.

It probably is. But it's probably in the same category of being one of the most difficult things to manufacture.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#168

Post by andsoitis »

ghc wrote: post #107
andsoitis wrote: post #100

Earlier 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 would a machine need to make anything? Is a robot arm not a machine? How about a trash compactor? Are the 6 types of simple machines not machines?

A machine is a device that uses energy to perform work. Typically by applying or transforming force, motion, or both.

The space shuttle can be thought of maybe as a collection of machines working in concert, but thinking of it as ONE machines renders the meaning of machine less useful.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#170

Post by SR2Z »

Therenas wrote: post #156
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‘d probably call it the most complex commercially available machine. You can‘t buy a Space Shuttle, or an LHC. You can buy a TSMC lithography machine, and it‘ll be delivered to you in much the same way as other equipment. Also, I think the axis it‘s probably most complex on is precision of individual parts and of their combination. Arguably chips themselves are more precise as their 'parts' are so small, but they ar…

> You can buy a TSMC lithography machine, and it‘ll be delivered to you in much the same way as other equipment.

Each one of these machines costs half a billion dollars and is protected by some of the most stringent export controls on the planet.

It does raise an interesting philosophical question: if I bolt two ASML lithography machines together, is the resulting machine more complicated?

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