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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

#51

Post by IAmBroom »

jstummbillig wrote: post #25

> 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).

On paper, the machine would save a lot of money for the fab houses. IRL: no one asked for it, and no one was willing to risk their entire production on a single, untried, swiss army knife of a fabricator.

The whole program was a wash. People were reassigned and the project died a very quick death. ASML lost a ton of money on this misguided attempt, but not enough to choke them.

So, they rolled the dice twice, and one gamble paid off handsomely. If it went the other way, they'd be a smaller company, and Moore's Law would be overshooting reality. If neither paid off, they'd be DOA.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#53

Post by throw0101c »

maxalbarello wrote: post #21
mytailorisrich wrote: post #11

It is unavoidable that, at some point, China will have its own matching or better machine because they obviously how incredibly strategically important it is.

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.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#54

Post by aa-jv »

xattt wrote: post #48

> To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks. Is this just restating the size of the same shipment three times?

No, its emphasizing that the size of the shipment necessitates multiple high capacity logistic steps.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#55

Post by IAmBroom »

maxalbarello wrote: post #21
mytailorisrich wrote: post #11

It is unavoidable that, at some point, China will have its own matching or better machine because they obviously how incredibly strategically important it is.

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 worked on part of it in 2006-8. I noticed that our office waste wasn't being shredded, and asked my boss why not...

"With all the problems we have getting this to work? We ought to ship our drawings to our competitors to slow them down!"

Very tongue-in-cheek, but... yeah. The entire machine underwent a massive overhaul when it was discovered that bare, unoxidized titanium in the presence of elemental hydrogen would absorb so much it became brittle. Who knew? Maybe some few chemists, but none worked in ASML design, as it happened.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#56

Post by aa-jv »

jstummbillig wrote: post #25

> 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?

We could have more ASML's immediately if we eradicate the desire to covet technology for one in-group, over another.

> reshaped society

Invalidate all of ASML's patents = get cheaper chips, sooner.

It is intellectual property which gives some of us the ability to build these things and sell them to others - get rid of this phony concept and we can have more nice things...

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#57

Post by codeulike »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #43
codeulike wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but if you dont say how long it will take them, youre not really saying anything.

> measured in a small number of decades at most

By "a small number of decades" do you mean from now, or starting from 15 years ago when the ASML Twinscan NXE:3100 made it debut?

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#59

Post by IAmBroom »

simne wrote: post #44
scotty79 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't make desktop computer 4 times larger but there's very little preventing you form putting 4 racks where you had 1 before. If the floor space is the expensive part of data center then probably some incentives are misaligned.

For about price of land and connectivity - in large city land price begin on few millions dollars per square kilometer, and usage of cable channels could cost from 50$ per meter (easy could be 200$/m). Plus, space arrange could last years. Heat dissipation in range of megawatts could be just prohibited by local regulations. So, space in large cities is very serious problem, and for business it is usually easier to "c…

> in large city land price begin on few millions dollars per square kilometer,

There's little need to put large datacenters in downtown Chicago and Manhattan.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#60

Post by maxglute »

KermitTheFrog wrote: post #18
mytailorisrich wrote: post #11

It is unavoidable that, at some point, China will have its own matching or better machine because they obviously how incredibly strategically important it is.

Non-zero chances - yes. Unavoidable - I wouldn't be so sure. I can't imagine how many top human-hours and cutting-edge inventions involved to construct this machine. And much of this simply cannot be stolen or bought, no matter how much money you have.

One can ballpark it, during EUV commercialization, ASML had 15k employees, Zeiss 3k, Cymer 1k. 20 years of non priority commercial development, lots of setbacks. Final integration ~5k suppliers. For reference commercial aviation Boeing/Airbus with as 100k employees, 50k suppliers. And we don't even know it's correct technical roadmap. Initially they thought synchrotron better than plasma/LPP but went with latter because synchrotron too expensive, now EUV machine prices ballooned to multiple synchrotron price. Don't be surprise if we find it dead end non competitive tech in 5-10 years if PRC or JP figures out SSMB/FEL etc, LPP may become economically uncompetitive and all ASML EUV becomes stranded assets. This real possibly because while ASML LPP works, it works at far higher cost than original projections, i.e. it's overbudget techstack with lethal scaling costs.

On paper EUV relatively modest undertaking vs commercial aviation, EUV deeper integration vs commercial aviation breadth, but in terms of scale of effort for nation state coordination, EUV probably all things considered, easier to replicate because it has no regulatory slowdown, it's purely host country physics problem. Having enough talent and throwing it at problem x espionage x poaching talent x time will likely solve precision physics problem sooner than later. Vs commercial aviation which has complicated geopolitical/regulatory hurdles and magnitude more suppliers and scale. TLDR EUV has smaller organizational surface area for determined state to pursue through concentrating $$$, talent and effort. You can buy a ex ASML to bootstrap EUV development, much harder to get globe to buy COMAC without decades of airworthiness. There's a reason western analysts predict PRC EUV in 2030s (meanwhile PRC already beat prototype estimate timeline), but probably not realistic for global COMAC in same timeframe, and PRC been hammering at commercial aviation seriously long before EUV.

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