stratechery had an interview w the founder, an interesting Brit but also a Thiel acolyte/investee, for better or worse. Ben also has tended a little too ...uncritical of tech boosterism these days, but I suppose the interview is good data
US startup Substrate announces chipmaking tool that it says will rival ASML
31–40 of 77 posts
Re: US startup Substrate announces chipmaking tool that it says will rival ASML
#32This doesn’t seem plausible. Leading edge lithography requires you to be at (or beyond) the cutting edge in many realms - even with a breakthrough in one realm, I don’t understand how a startup could expect to catch up to ASML across the board in a few years. Their website is light on technical details and heavy on nationalistic fluff, which does not lend much confidence.
Their website is that way because the goal is to attract the attention of the administration.
Exactly. And it should. The "CHIPS Act" should be thought of as a perpetual blank cheque to whoever can build the components necessary to build war machines completely with North American components (primarily USA components but Canada will have some impact)
Re: US startup Substrate announces chipmaking tool that it says will rival ASML
#33More Silicon Valley fraud that will likely be rewarded by the current administration.
Re: US startup Substrate announces chipmaking tool that it says will rival ASML
#34The same guys who couldn’t develop a sleep tracker? https://open.substack.com/pub/foxchapelresearch/p/i-think-su... Edit please note the comments in the linked post by SemiAnalysis below who have lots of reports that the tool is legit but who are skeptical. They have clearly progressed somewhat since the tracker project!
Wow, total scam. Sad.
Re: US startup Substrate announces chipmaking tool that it says will rival ASML
#35This doesn’t seem plausible. Leading edge lithography requires you to be at (or beyond) the cutting edge in many realms - even with a breakthrough in one realm, I don’t understand how a startup could expect to catch up to ASML across the board in a few years. Their website is light on technical details and heavy on nationalistic fluff, which does not lend much confidence.
It is actually relatively easy to make a lithography machine that can etch features beyond what EUV can do. You simply use an electron scanning beam rather than photons.
It's what the industry uses to create the masks used in lithography machines, but it could just as easily be used to make the actual chip. The problem is that it doesn't scale, at all. A scanning process is way too slow to be useful in mass production.
Thus you should always be skeptical when someone says they've built a machine that beats ASML's machines, because that's actually the easy part. The hard part is scaling it up.
Re: US startup Substrate announces chipmaking tool that it says will rival ASML
#36This doesn’t seem plausible. Leading edge lithography requires you to be at (or beyond) the cutting edge in many realms - even with a breakthrough in one realm, I don’t understand how a startup could expect to catch up to ASML across the board in a few years. Their website is light on technical details and heavy on nationalistic fluff, which does not lend much confidence.
I don't know much about the technical details of lithography, but I do know that EUV lithography is very new tech that has been in production for less than 10 years and the current machines are basically rube goldberg devices. Given my lack of technical knowledge here, I can't say whether or nor this startup in particular is legit, but it does seem very much like the type of thing that could be disrupted by someone w…
EUV machines were in development for nearly 20 years before they could reach actual chip production.
The secret sauce was not getting it to work, but getting it to work stable enough such that it can be sustained millions of times per second. I am sure there were other huge challenges in bringing to market though, I am not an expert on this either.
Re: US startup Substrate announces chipmaking tool that it says will rival ASML
#37>"at a high rate of throughput"
will "high rate" or "high throughput" do or it is just me?
Re: US startup Substrate announces chipmaking tool that it says will rival ASML
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their website is that way because the goal is to attract the attention of the administration.
Exactly. And it should. The "CHIPS Act" should be thought of as a perpetual blank cheque to whoever can build the components necessary to build war machines completely with North American components (primarily USA components but Canada will have some impact)
But its a scam.
Re: US startup Substrate announces chipmaking tool that it says will rival ASML
#39This doesn’t seem plausible. Leading edge lithography requires you to be at (or beyond) the cutting edge in many realms - even with a breakthrough in one realm, I don’t understand how a startup could expect to catch up to ASML across the board in a few years. Their website is light on technical details and heavy on nationalistic fluff, which does not lend much confidence.
It is actually relatively easy to make a lithography machine that can etch features beyond what EUV can do. You simply use an electron scanning beam rather than photons. It's what the industry uses to create the masks used in lithography machines, but it could just as easily be used to make the actual chip. The problem is that it doesn't scale, at all. A scanning process is way too slow to be useful in mass productio…
Interesting! Makes me think of old 1990s X-Files episodes with chips under a microscope “smaller than we can produce”.
I wonder if the government makes small batches of bespoke chips that are super miniature based on non scalable processes, and how far back in time would they have been able to develop 1nm chips for example?
Re: US startup Substrate announces chipmaking tool that it says will rival ASML
#40You know who is going to develop cutting edge EUV+ lithography to rival ASML? It's not this startup (most likely). It's China.
Chipmaking is in a very weird geopolitical state and it has national security interests for most of the world. A Dutch company produces the machines to make chips and sells them to Taiwanese companies. The US still has the power to dictate who ASML can sell to and China is restricted.
This system has a number of flaws:
1. With this administration torching US influence at a never-seen-before rate, the US may no longer be able to dictate terms to ASML. At some point, it's all going to be too much for the EU;
2. Taiwan is disputed territory. This statement tends to make people mad but it's true. China claims it as China but, more importantly, the One China policy is official policy of the US [1] and the EU. Yet the US also has a defence pact with Taiwan. Not that it matters because China simply doesn't have the military capability to invade Taiwan and I honestly don't think they would anyway; and
3. The US has basically lost the ability to fab chips. Yes, Intel exists but they are a shadow of their former selves. The CHIPS Act tried to rectify this but even if this administration hadn't basically abandoned it, I don't think the US can see this one through regardless of administration. It's too long term. Any US company now that gets government aid just uses it on more executive compensation and share buybacks. Everything is now so financialized that any ability to produce anything is really just inertia from a bygone era.
China has the exact same national security concerns except it has a proven track record of investing in and delivering long-term projects.
[1]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-us-one-china-policy-and-w...