ASML's Secret: A view from inside the global semiconductor giant [video]

To summarize the video the secret is just how the people collaborate. Some parts seem oddly manual and others interestingly esoteric. Interesting little detail is how that researcher knows the political game of not presenting to Intel but instead having the VP himself present.

At least there is a lesson for society here about how to keep people together instead of dividing them. I'm both fascinated by the company, and like others in the company drawn by the technology, but also wonder if I would have a problem working in this cult like setting.

> Some parts seem oddly manual and others interestingly esoteric.

They don't really make that many machine for heavy automation to make much sense.

By the end of 2021 they had made ~140 EUV machines in total with commercial production starting in 2011. So if you average it out they make ~15 per year. Though the production rate has most likely ramped up over the years so most of those have been built closer to today then 2011.

And in those ~140 EUV machines there is many different versions with improvements. So you would have had to redo your automation lines multiple times over the process of building them.

In total they make around 300 machines per year at the moment but only a fraction of them are the highest end ones.

What's the purpose of this corridor the workers walk through? Some kind of cleaning process, or a security scan to make sure they're not bringing in unauthorized devices?

https://youtu.be/zQu_TMgHO98?t=34

It's an air shower designed to get any last bits off your bunny suit before you go into the cleanroom.

I absolutely despise the ancient traditional ways they practice: referring to their techniques of 'mystery', secrecy, and occultation of knowledge (which they do in order to construct knowledge as authority and then wield it as power)

they've overdone it. by this point they have made it way to fucking difficult for people to truly come to grips with the complexity of modern life mostly becuase in their zealous protection of 'technical knowledge' they've made a life such as my own impossible to realize (this in turn, stunts the advancement and development of ways to cope with the consequences of modernity and high-technology in the culture at large, becuase people cannot learn to undesrtand enough that they can figure it out; they move us to a scenario in which only their own chosen selected few are in a position from which something could be done; but they select for obedience and dullness; not for spark)

Maybe my reasoning is leaping a lot; but as I see things, this attitude towards knowledge and understanding is the cause of the now troubling distrust in the academic-scientific apparatus by a largely ignorant public (an ignorance which is somebody's profit).

this attitude has stunted my own personal pursuit of happiness. that I cannot easily come to understand their 'propietary' techniques (higher-order logical systems, advanced litography, etc) that they use to do what they do is just frustrating.

I'll end by adding that there are many more instances of this attitude around knowledge in other subjects I've studied... even some which are no longer considered 'sacred' (in more 'developed' countries) but which were still making people act all mysterious and in awe of 'the knowledge' in my own famously ignorant native country.