> 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?

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IAmBroom an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	smueller1234 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The timelines matter as well: They were working on EUV at Zeiss (who make the lensing/mirroring systems) already in 2005. That's about 20 years of development.

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

I mean, it’s been tried; a reading of relevant historical texts would give you lots of ammunition to support either argument.

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aa-jv an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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...

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wahern 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The article might disagree. See the subsection, "The importance of tacit knowledge". OTOH, if that tacit knowledge is indeed so critical then there's less risk (e.g. regarding future investment incentives) to narrowing patent protections. OTOOH, ASML's supply chain is deep and complex, and the patent portfolio is presumably similarly diffuse, which makes it difficult to analyze or even, short of a complete patent regime overhaul, identify which patents to open up to accelerate adoption.

	▲	rigonkulous 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		ASML's supply chain is deep and complex - and secret. But if it were F/OSS (just imagine it) from sand to chip, that complexity would have a wider scope of human attention applied to it. What is happening with ASML now, once happened with the wheel. Think about that.

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

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.

	▲	rigonkulous 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		"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. A chipfab in central Europe, for example, would go a long way towards putting out most of the worlds fires ..

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runako an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That's a great way to lower the cost of the current generation of the tech while ensuring there is no next generation of the tech.

	▲	rigonkulous 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think that makes any sense whatsoever. If everyone could make these machines, there'd be more of these machines. There are so many examples of this out there, already, that I find this specious "no next generation" argument to be either simply coming from bias, or ignorance. For sure, we only care about Taiwan because there is one Taiwan. End patents: no more Taiwan problem.