Everything was perfectly fine until that damned monolith showed up.
People talk about you behind your back.
But do they call me Og the Tool-Maker? Do they call me Og the Flint-Knapper?
It hurts just as much, but half as many people are embarrassed.
You guys, just watch it. It’s one of the rare videos actually worth the hour. OK, maybe it could’ve been 40 min, but still.
You get the sound of one hand clapping, of course.
I highly recommend the Asianometry youtube channel for anyone interested in, among other topics, ASML/TSMC/EUV lithography. Most of his vids are about 10-30 mins.
China has reportedly reproduced an EUV machine. Done in a top secret lab, which everyone is comparing to the Manhattan Project.
And in a few more years, it’ll be someone’s Eagle Scout project…
By all accounts, the technology to fully implement these machines is so stupifyingly complex, even the headstart of public knowledge and even some access to a working one isn’t nearly enough. I’m imagining the guys researching the Terminator parts or Independence Day flying saucer. “The only thing we can say for certain is that this part is the elbow.”
It’s known that ASML relies on, in the strongest way possible, a partnership with optics conglomerate Zeiss which is probably not available to the Chinese. It’s safe to further assume that there are a bunch of sole-suppliers like these, each with ultradifficult secrets to keep.
They’ll get there but probably in a handful of years or so.
China has the advantage that now they know it can be done, and even though a lot of the tech is undoubtedly proprietary and secret, there’s enough public information to be useful. For example, the presence of hydrogen with a small amount of oxygen to keep the mirrors clean of tin deposits, although precise pressures and flow rates are probably secret. As has probably been stated in the thread, AMSL is of course prohibited from selling to China.
If China can steal nuclear reactor and fighter plane designs, is it really that hard for them to infiltrate various electronics and optics manufacturers too? A hundred million dollars here and there in bribes isn’t much for them, but it would be generational wealth for anybody working in one of those companies…
I don’t think there’s any secrets the Chinese need to steal to reproduce the EUV machine. It’s just incredibly complex and reinventing that will take a while. It’s possible, though, that they will be able to improve on the design which would actually be kind of cool.
Similarly, the Chinese government is trying to build a commercial passenger jet to compete with Boeing and Airbus. That’s not easy either, but I expect them to eventually develop something competitive.
As evidenced by the existence of this video.
And yeah, it’s hugely complicated, but we’re talking about the resources of the government of one of the most powerful nations in the world. They can afford “hugely complicated”.
Never mind, of course, that they could just buy one from the current manufacturer. And then, if they want to improve it, they could just focus on improving any one component, and use that one component they improved with the rest of the machine as-bought. It’s referred to as a single machine, but really, it’s not: It’s a system of a great many separate machines, all working together.
Not easily, since it’s an export-controlled technology.
Starting in 2018, the United States began pressuring the Netherlands to block ASML from selling EUV systems to China. The restrictions expanded in 2022, when the Biden administration imposed sweeping export controls designed to cut off China’s access to advanced semiconductor technology. No EUV system has ever been sold to a customer in China, ASML told Reuters.
Actually I don’t think the Chinese are allowed to buy one.
How effectively can those restrictions be enforced? There obviously are some customers who can and do buy these… What would happen if one of those customers then just turned around and resold it?
Re-export is a persistent risk, and usually how these export restrictions get evaded. But the original buyer is put under huge legal and financial risk if somehow a thingie they bought winds up in forbidden hands. If there’s even the faintest whiff that the buyer is shell-buying for anyone else, the original exporter is supposed to cancel the transaction and blacklist the buyer.
They cost $200 to $400 million each, are bigger than a double-decker bus, and the only company on Earth that makes them sold only 44 of them last year. There is nothing subtle or easy to lose track of about them.
Inside the lab, High NA qualification team lead Assia Haddou gave CNBC an exclusive, up-close look at the High NA machines, which she said are “bigger than a double-decker bus.”
The machine is made up of four modules, manufactured in Connecticut, California, Germany and the Netherlands, then assembled in the Veldhoven, Netherlands, lab for testing and approval, before being disassembled again to ship out. Haddou said it takes seven partially loaded 747s, or at least 25 trucks, to get one system to a customer.
+ No more maintenance/repair/spares for you…
A $400.000,000,- doorstopper