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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

#81

Post by rigonkulous »

bombcar wrote: post #66
aa-jv wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Or you could have nobody bother to invest in things like this because of no reward, or they become closely guarded trade secrets of which the Elves keep and nobody else is even allowed to know they exist.

"no reward" is weak, because of course you wouldn't make a wheel, say, unless you intended to roll somewhere.

You're basically saying "ASML's entire production line is worthless unless it is rare and coveted", which is .. obviously not true .. because of course the output is immensely useful.

The world needs more chipfabs, not less. A properly scaled chipfab in places like Broome or Santiago, or .. indeed in orbit .. would go a long way to sorting out the worlds fires.

The thing stopping us, is the international, imperial system of patents and intellectual 'property', which make nation states subservient to each other on the basis of ideas.

The ideas could be spreading far and wide, but we humans are keeping them in our cage, in which the only reward is having other cages to extract wealth from ..

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#82

Post by kens »

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 measure of complexity. One could use "number of parts" (whatever that means): NASA says the Space Shuttle has 2.5 million moving parts, while the article says the ASML machine has over 100,000 components. Another issue is how to deal with composition. A TSMC fab is obviously more complex than a lithography machine since it contains a lithography machine, but maybe the fab doesn't count as a "machine". Another issue is complexity vs parts: a 32-Gb DRAM chip has about 68 billion transistors and capacitors, but it's not extremely complex, since it's mostly the same thing repeated. And then there's the question of distribution: can you really count the Internet as one "thing"?

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#84

Post by phyzome »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #41

Rule of thumb: when something is being called "The World's Most Complex Machine", its either CERN's Large Hadron Collider or an ASML EUV machine. In this case, its the latter.

Whereas if it's the largest machine, they're talking about the electrical grid.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#85

Post by chirau »

_nhacker wrote: post #52

Hey, author of the piece here. Glad people seem to have enjoyed it. If you're looking for more sources on ASML/EUV I put together a bibliography of things I looked at while writing the piece https://neilhacker.com/2026/04/28/asml-article-bibliography/

Who ruled this the most complex machine? And by what metric?

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#86

Post by mytailorisrich »

Someone wrote: post #36
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?

High-NA EUV, apparently. https://www.reuters.com/business/asml-says-next-gen-euv-tool... : - ASML's High-NA EUV machines ready for high-volume production - Machines have processed 500,000 wafers, showing technical readiness - Full integration into manufacturing expected in 2-3 years, ASML's CTO says After that, it may be X-rays. A disruptive step would be to move to 3D printing, but that (among other issues) is too s…

Nvidia's latest Rubin architecture has 336 billion transistors, and there are ~10 per wafer.

Even leaving size aside, I don't think that there are any credible way to 3D print something that complex.

Lithography enables that level of complexity because each layer is done in one go. I think any alternative technologies would have that property, too.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#87

Post by kens »

Amorymeltzer wrote: post #12

It's been mentioned before, but Chris Miller's Chip War from a few years back is an excellent, very-readable book on the topic. Goes into depth on the history and development of chips and their production. He did the rounds on the interviews back then, and it's definitely worth a read. The EUV stuff is great, but I particularly liked his history on how the USSR was always going to lose and how integral Apollo really…

Chip War is an interesting book, but it has a lot of errors, which made it frustrating to read. For instance, it said that vacuum tube computers were hardly usable because they attracted moths, so they required constant debugging and were only used in specialized applications like cryptography. This is wrong in many ways. Most notably, Grace Hopper's story of the moth was in the Harvard Mark II computer, a relay computer. (I saw the actual moth yesterday, by the way.) Vacuum tube computers were highly popular, selling in the thousands for numerous general-purpose applications. And contrary to Chip War, ENIAC was not used to compute artillery tables during WWII, because it wasn't running until the war ended. This was just a half-page section in the book, but it messed up a lot of things.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#88

Post by clark_dent »

hackrmn wrote: post #28

> These machines are roughly the size of double-decker buses. To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks. They are the world’s most complex objects. Each contains over one hundred thousand components, all of which have to be perfectly calibrated for the machine to produce light consistently at the right wavelength. As a software engineer by trade, the above parable communicates to m…

Complexity doesn't necessarily mean it's suboptimal. Lithography and nanofab are usually doing a whole range of disparate and wildly exotic processes with extreme vacuum, plasmas, electron guns; any number of crazy and dangerous process gases like H2, HF, or silane; and occasionally raw materials like iridium and rhodium. And that's all without the actual lithography. When your margin for error is measured in single atoms and your number of features per die outnumber the planet's population 2:1, physical laws start to stand in the way of simplification.

The one 'machine' encompasses more disciplines than most universities offer. It's really a whole bleeding edge factory compressed into a room.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#89

Post by throw0101c »

maxalbarello wrote: post #70
throw0101c wrote: post #53

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. 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.

yeah but maybe there the stakes are not as high. although i guess it touches the military and so it might be

The stakes may not be considered as high for jet engines, but the problems may also be (relatively) easier too.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#90

Post by fuzzfactor »

_nhacker wrote: post #52

Hey, author of the piece here. Glad people seem to have enjoyed it. If you're looking for more sources on ASML/EUV I put together a bibliography of things I looked at while writing the piece https://neilhacker.com/2026/04/28/asml-article-bibliography/

Excellent article, Mr. Hacker :)

>ASML started off life within Philips, the Dutch consumer electronics giant.

Who started with light bulbs which were using the electrons for direct visual and UI/UX purposes. Some of the most simple electronic components, but quite a bit like appliances themselves. No surprise a lamp in English means either a bulb, an appliance, or both.

Vacuum tubes were the next step up in complexity and I guess you can take it from there.

In the early radio days it didn't take too many "ampules" to make a radio. Not nearly as complex as a cellphone, but bizarrely more complicated than a light bulb already.

The Edison Effect turned out to be a very strong force after all :)

At one time every building that had electronics, had vacuum tubes. When you moved a radio or TV set, you were carrying your own little vacuum chambers with you from place to place, even as late as CRT's.

With solid-state electronics like this, the vacuum chambers are much bigger, but are only located in a centralized factory process, so you don't have to carry them around with you if you want to be portable.

You wouldn't want to anyway, look how heavy they have gotten ;)

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