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?

▲

Someone 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 slow at the moment. Maybe, ideas from nano robotics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanorobotics) can help there.

	▲	q3k 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> A disruptive step would be to move to 3D printing The lithography equivalents of that are laser direct write lithography and e-beam lithography. They've been used for decades in research labs, but they're impossibly slow for any mass production. Atomic Semi are trying to make some derivative of these processes happen at a commercial scale.

▲

throw0101c an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

	▲	maxalbarello 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		yeah but maybe there the stakes are not as high. although i guess it touches the military and so it might be

▲

sbarre 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Honestly I thought the same, but after watching a couple of videos on how EUV actually works, and what ASML (and the 1,200 other specialized companies that feed into its supply chain) built..

I can understand why you can't just take one apart and copy it.

There's (apparently) 4 decades of accumulated cutting edge scientific research that has gone into these machines.

I suspect the machinery, process and human expertise required to simply produce the parts required for these machines is the real moat (oh and I guess the US-led export controls too).

The build tolerances for components are incredible. There are 11 primary mirrors in an EUV machine, each one has something like 100 coats of ultra-pure materials that are precisely deposited in picometer-thick layers with tolerances in the nanometers, across a 1-meter wide curved surface.

Then you have to position the mirrors perfectly inside the machine, again with tolerances in the nanometers.

So even if you know what you need to do, having the equipment and expertise to do it is a different thing.

And that's just one part of the 100,000+ parts that make up an EUV machine.

	▲	nextaccountic 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe copying it is too fragile (but I note that China copied the F-35) But in this case the Chinese will just develop their own alternative, that might work as good or even better

▲

IAmBroom an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.