I have an interesting discussion with a senior colleague: why ASML? why are they by far the best? Their competitors are a few generations behind.
The colleague claimed that there is no special magic. It's not that ASML is using some otherwise unknown laws of physics nor is any single step or component particularly special or novel. It's just that they meticulously optimized each step, and the sum of such steps is the winning solution.
In fact, this is probably why it's so hard to copy ASML. If there was a single magic component, a single or few engineers could be poached away to a competitor to copy it. However, copying a well-optimized company with many simultaneous optima is a much harder task.
Our discussion was in the context of why our quant hedgefund competitor was performing so well, far above the market norm. By nature and design, quant finance is an incredibly efficient field (and most techniques are more or less known by veterans), and we had thought unlikely that one fund could do so much better. Our conclusion was that this fund must be the well-optimized ASML of our field. My colleague happened to know the founder and indeed that was his personal impression as well.
The best explanation as to why ASML is so dominant is that they have locked out the best suppliers by signing exclusivity deals with them. If you want to compete with ASML you have to vertically build: the best lenses, the best lasers, the best metrology. A new entrant would need to replace ten different world-class vendors simultaneously.
Unlike common business wisdom that dictates having multiple suppliers to mitigate risk, ASML succeeds by identifying the best supplier in the world for each critical component—such as Zeiss for optics or their specific metrology group—and securing exclusive, multi-year deals with them.
It does seem like the USG should fund a few $10B to build out the alternative stack, given the strategic sensitivity. Best time to have started would have been 20y ago, second best is today.
The US Government made ASML dominant when it allowed it to acquire (US Company) Cymer, Inc.- the company that was best in the world at the time at EUV. Merging Cymer's EUV work with ASML's meticulous perfection and delivery of the entire rest of the system is what made them the only vendor that matters for semiconductor manufacturers.
This acquisition is also what gives the US Government the ability to veto customers of ASML even today- this is why Chinese semiconductor manufacturing is so far behind, because the USG controls who can access ASML's EUV work.
Correct. Funny enough though, their corporate structure and the name AG means they do have stocks, but they are not traded and 100% privately owned. For some reason I see this often with German companies, e.g. the German railway. Not sure why that is, although for the railway plausible since they are owned by the state that might eventually want to sell parts of it.
Zeiss and Schott are both owned in their entirety by a foundation that is not allowed to sell shares. Most of the dividends go to larger research institutions in southern Germany (about $80 million to Heidelberg, Stuttgart, Tübingen, Freiburg, Ulm, Mainz, Jena).
I believe the two applicable options to have a company that counts as its own "person" is either AG or GmbH (~= LLC / "limited").
There is also SE which is a EU form for an AG, and various "partnership" forms that involve a partner that's fully liable. Usually, that partner is not an actual person but a "legal person", i.e. another SE or GmbH.
Even if you're not listed on a stock market, you might want to take on investments, e.g. "give me 10 million for 5% of the company" and I assume the latter is much easier with an AG.
An AG corporation has stocks in order to track who owns how much and also attach different economic and voting rights to different classes of stock. The other way to incorporate a limited-liability company in Germany is the GmbH, which tracks ownership directly in the articles of incorporation, but are in other ways subject to way lower management, disclosure and accounting requirements. So the AG is mostly useful if you want it to be easy to change your ownership structure, if you for instance raise capital from new investors, issue employee shares, change cross-ownership within a conglomerate or go public some day.
Why Carl Zeiss is an AG I don't know. The West German Carl Zeiss was re-formed as a GmbH in 1946, but had changed to an AG by 1973. The East German Carl Zeiss was turned into a GmbH during reunification and then split in two. One part merged into the West German Carl Zeiss AG and the other is now called Jenoptik. Jenoptik was converted into an AG in 1996 and went public in 1998. AFAICT Carl Zeiss has been privately owned by the Carl Zeiss-Stiftung since 1889, except of course for the temporary East German part.
AFAIK that’s how incorporated companies work in Europe.
Here in Sweden we have A LOT of companies own and operated by state and local government and they’re all “aktiebolag” which literally translates to “stock companies”. For smaller businesses you can register as a sole proprietor and some other odd structures if you are a group of people. You’ll often see the same thing for non-profits as well.
It would fall under the category of exclusive dealing.(1) Exclusive dealing is never per se illegal, but it can be as a matter of judgment before a court.
ASML would argue that it's legitimately justified because
a) there is mutual coinvestment (ASML owns 25% of Zeiss semi optics division) and thus there is symbiosis / shared risk not a simple exclusionary supply contract
b) no viable alternative customers exist for Zeiss so it doesn't matter
c) EUV litho is so tightly coupled to optics that having a single supplier is a technical necessity
d) the market was CREATED through innovation and investment across ASML and suppliers, rather than exclusionary conduct (cf. the difference between "a monopoly" and "monopolization")
The affordance of a monopoly also prevents free riding. ASML and Zeiss spent billions of dollars and decades co-developing very specific, custom-tailored technology. If a competitor could simply walk up to Zeiss and buy the lenses that ASML spent billions helping to develop, the competitor would be free riding on ASML's investment - and creating a chilling effect for future innovation.
b) no viable alternative customers exist for Zeiss so it doesn't matter
c) EUV litho is so tightly coupled to optics that having a single supplier is a technical necessity
B can also be an argument against putting exclusivity into a contract.
C is just a business decision - exclusivity due to need, not contract.
> best suppliers by signing exclusivity deals with them
In the UK, if you are a supplier and lock in an exclusivity deal, and also you are small business, they don't treat you as legitimate business and company revenue gets taxed as employment income (IR35).
I wonder why regulators don't look into that. If they have exclusive deal, are they really in business or is it just some sort of tax structure masqueraded as supply chain?
It's hard to qualify Zeiss as a "small business". Also, they pay their own employees wages and deduct taxes and social insurance so it's not like they pretend to be an independent contractor to save some money.
Technology can explain why ASML or other companies are dominant at a given moment but it can't explain how it became dominant. Essentially, technological superiority involves research and that requires money. IE, it is a product of investment in the various technologies.
The history of ASML involves a "failed" company that other multinationals felt they had to keep alive to allow the technologies to continue. And that's saying that the capital investment needed to produce a thing of that scale can't work if it is subject to a yearly profit cycle (or works much more poorly).
The further factor shaping ASML is that as chip technology has grown, the investment required for support technology has grown and so only a single supplier can remain profitable and it seem logical there would only be a single company acting as supplier (maintaining research and expertise in two or three huge companies, only one of which can be profitable at a time, is highly inefficient - why we're done down to 1-3 cutting edge chip makers at this point also).
So ASML was economically logical and it being in Europe is perhaps a combination of European tradition and Europe wanting some part of the global chip production system (which is by a fair bit the largest/most-valuable concentration of capital and technology in the world).
ASML is in Europe because Philips/NXP is in Europe. The fundamental research EUV is based on was done in the US, then made available to industry via a holding company called EUV, LLC. Intel tried to bring in Canon and Nikon, but was rejected by the US government. Two others were approved, ASML and an American company called SVG. ASML spent a couple decades doing the incredibly hard work of productizing EUV and acquired SVG along the way. Canon and Nikon tried playing catch-up with an Asian consortium, but arrived late to the party.
> it being in Europe is perhaps a combination of European tradition and Europe wanting some part of the global chip production system
The US doesn't randomly hold export veto power on ASML through unilateral threats. EUV had a lot of tech transfer from the US of the initial research as the sibling comment lays out, and the agreements for those transfers allowed restrictions.
ASLM have put massive financial investment into getting where they are including raising money from customers like Intel in return for shares. Also, form wikipedia "employs more than 42,000 people.. and relies on a network of nearly 5,000 tier 1 suppliers". It's going to be a lot of time and money to match that.
Obviously, there are a lot of reasons why. But it boils down to having the vision, the belief and the strength to follow through over many years. It's important to not confound vision with random Kool-Aid. Instead it's grounded in research. That research is itself grounded in a strong vision and belief — it got laughed by the entire physics community at the time:
> 'people seemed unwilling to believe bending x-rays, and they tended to
that we had actually made an image by regard the whole thing as a big fish story
Now contrast this with the current academic reality — "publish or perish" and the reality of venture financing and corporate culture that "depends" (arguably in self-inflicted manner, that's not 100% the case) on quarterly repots.
ASML is just a recent story, but if you look back, you'll see that most revolutions have a similar pattern of people crazy enough to deviate from the herd.
The rest— the immense financial risk, the 5000 suppliers, etc. came as a result of having the ability to see through all the noise and the grit to to follow through when everyone calls you an idiot for not doing something "useful"
One could argue that NVidia's advantage comes from a similar vision epiphany that led to them developing CUDA years before it was viable. The result is similar.
I'm tempted to call that pure luck. As far as they knew, crypto would be the killer app.
However, if you start with the assumption that at some point, people are going to need a lot of fast parallel compute for something, you could rationally justify their long-term strategy. They skated where the proverbial puck was going. They couldn't see the puck, but they were pretty sure there was one. In hindsight that really does look like a safe bet.
People were (ab)using OpenGL to run compute on GPUs in 2004-2006, doing stuff like rendering 2 triangles covering the whole screen and then doing the actual compute in the pixel shaders, getting 10x speedups over CPUs for some problems.
NVIDIA just had their eyes open to an obvious market demand and made it easier by creating CUDA.
Nvidia subsidized machine learning research for years (both with CUDA, hardware donations and developing what was a very niche product line just for them) before deep learning became big, much less the advent of LLMs.
Certainly Jensen seemed to have an extremely long view on this burgeoning machine learning market in the early 2010's.
It didn’t hurt that they had a two companies named Intel and Microsoft that completely missed the boat where GPUs or mobile computing were concerned both are currently the top two companies in tech today by market cap?
CUDA came out of the need for running parallel cores in their GPUs. This is not luck, it's product evolution. They did it first, they did it best, and they are reaping the benefits. The alternative here is to Not have CUDA and continue writing sub-optimal code for GPUs.
Very true one thing you have to be impressed with is ASML willingness over time to iterate and iterate again nose to the grindstone. More companies could learn a lesson from that. There were several American companies that had it all in the last 60 years and squandered it. IBM, Xerox, Kodak, US Steel.
Basically, ASML has an incredible pan-European supply chain of the sort of stuff Europe does best. Deep tech, advanced precision manufacturing, that sort of thing.
I know it's popular to poo-poo Europe around these parts, but those are the sort of thing we genuinely are the best in the world at. Technology isn't just shiny apps and LLMs. It's also this sort of thing, and the shiny LLMs wouldn't work without it.
ASML actually did develop new (understanding of the) laws of physics, the so called Extended Nijboer-Zernike theory in the early 2000's (which extended diffraction optics to work in the high-NA regions relevant to modern lithography) and subsequently patented its application.
Zernike, a Nobel prize winning physicist who worked on optics, was also Dutch, and developed the original Zernike theory of aberrations in the mid 20th century. This was a vast improvement over previous theories as it was far more useful for optical design and analysis.
So the Dutch have a rich history of developing the most advanced physical theories for optical engineering (all the way back to Huygens even)
> It's not that ASML is using some otherwise unknown laws of physics nor is any single step or component particularly special or novel. It's just that they meticulously optimized each step, and the sum of such steps is the winning solution.
Previously in the context of Apple I likened this to becoming a chess grandmaster: all you have to do is make the optimal decision every time you make a move, over and over again, for years
People don't like hearing that there isn't One Weird Trick which you can just copy, but it's the reality of these situations. To the extent that they can be analyzed, the best people to send are often anthropologists to look at the decision making culture. Culture is even harder to copy; this was a factor in the difficulties of TSMC Arizona starting up, despite it being literally the same company it's not the same people.
No, not Rentech. While Rentech is truly marvelous, it has been around for a while. There is a new kid in town, and this kid is very very good. To the point that it drove out other veteran shops out of the same market it traded.
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"?
I just watched the Vertasium video[1] on ASML's EUV lithgoraphy machines over the weekend, and I think the qualifier they used was "most complex machine _you can purchase commercially_".
I can't remember if it was an ASML representative that said that, or if it was an overlaid asterisk that popped up on the screen at some point - but I definitely remember thinking about the space shuttle and Saturn V/Apollo and those sorts of things before I saw the qualifier.
I‘d probably call it the most complex commercially available machine. You can‘t buy a Space Shuttle, or an LHC. You can buy a TSMC lithography machine, and it‘ll be delivered to you in much the same way as other equipment.
Also, I think the axis it‘s probably most complex on is precision of individual parts and of their combination. Arguably chips themselves are more precise as their 'parts' are so small, but they are much more homogeneous compared to the EUV machine, where tons of different materials and part sizes need to combine.
I asked the ASML rep at KubeCon who they were there for as nobody I knew had a quarter billion to spare. He told me they were just interested customers, but if I didn't want the newest machine I could get one for 70 million euros.
Right but it still gets put into boxes and flown over by a 747. Of course it‘s more complicated than that, but most contenders for complex machines are much more built in-place, and not a complete 'product' being assembled.
I doubt that anything in the military is that advanced or complex, including nuclear subs.
A big part of it is the secrecy itself. Things get difficult when you can't communicate. Your pool of candidates for the job is limited: you may not want people with foreign connections, some people don't want to work for the military, don't like the paperwork, don't like the idea that they can't value their skills for another job, etc... In addition, military technology is supposed to work on the battlefield, you don't want delicate stuff there, you want rugged, repairable, proven, reliable.
I think the reason secret military stuff appear so advanced, besides the aura it projects, is that it deals with fields that are underrepresented outside of the military. Like stealth for instance. Stealth is of limited use outside of a conflict. So of course, the stealth package of a nuclear submarine will be much more advanced than the almost nonexistant civilian stealth technology. But for things that are relevant to civilians, like the reactors, engines, etc.., I am sure that what's in subs is relatively simple, and probably dated.
> But for things that are relevant to civilians, like the reactors, engines, etc.., I am sure that what's in subs is relatively simple, and probably dated.
It seems like submarine propeller designs are all classified past 1960, even though quiet and efficient propellers pretty relevant to civilian ship design:
The thing about military stuff is that generally the budget is large and the goal is to design something better than what the enemy has. The civilian world for a long time wasn't willing to blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on ASICs to control phased-array radars; the military was. Now as a result of lots of military investment, the technology is so well-understood that Google put a phased array on a chip inside the front of the Pixel 5.
> In addition, military technology is supposed to work on the battlefield, you don't want delicate stuff there, you want rugged, repairable, proven, reliable.
What you want is stuff that wins fights, and it only needs to be repairable and reliable insofar as it wins fights. The US has the F-22, which is an ultra expensive jet that only has ~60% uptime. In war games, it achieves kill ratios of 100:1, so the military is more than happy to keep it around. When the US raided Osama bin Laden's compound they sent brand new stealth helicopters even though they knew the platform was less reliable.
> In addition, military technology is supposed to work on the battlefield, you don't want delicate stuff there, you want rugged, repairable, proven, reliable.
I used to work for a military contractor.
The stuff we would get back from the field looked like it had been fed through a wood-chipper, and this was peacetime (1980s). They had these special field racks, that had a rackmount suspended inside a huge plastic box (with front and back panels). Didn't save the units inside, though. A lot of time, they were torn off the racks, and rattling around, inside the container.
The kit was not cheap. Our standard units (a super Bearcat Scanner, basically) cost about $40,000 USD (1980s USD). They were 2-4U units, and the racks usually had five or six of them.
There's an urban legend about Admiral Rickover. His office was on the second floor of the Pentagon. If a salesgoblin came in, with sample kit, it was said that he walked over to his window, and dropped it outside. He then said "If it still works, we'll talk."
In either case, the secret design has the same effect, but sub secrets are the top of the top of top secret. Spies that leak sub secrets, spend a long time in Leavenworth.
haha, I actually had exactly this question for myself and I asked Gemini in comparison to Falcon/Musk Rockets.
It said that from a complexity level to construct, the ASML Twin:EXE machine is much more complicated, esp. much more freh research was required to achieve their nanometer structures - a Falcon is a complex vehicle, but compared to "how much do we need to know to create it on an industrial scale",the ASML devices seems to be more complex.
I see that. And I see it repeated all over. Still skeptical.
Googling for total part count also comes up with the 2.5M number. They move WRT Earth, but the vast majority do not move with respect to each other, is my guess.
For a sanity check comparison: Saturn V estimates are ~5 million total parts, and "tens of thousands" of moving parts. A ratio that sounds sort of normal.
I guess that depends on what is considered moving. A latch is, but is a vibration dampener? On launch, I bet a lot of parts are moving that you probably would not otherwise want to be.
> An orthogonal question is what makes sense as a measure of complexity.
I don't know, but number of parts doesn't seem good. I feel that complexity should be measured in bits, but how to tie it with something real idk. Maybe the amount of knowledge needed to reproduce the machine? It is hard to measure though, because knowledge in people heads can't me measured precisely, we can estimate it but it will be a very rough estimate.
But the knowledge by itself is not enough, because there difficulties when producing that pure knowledge can't solve, they need a specialized equipment or source materials, and arguably it adds to a complexity too.
Or we can try from completely different angle, how about the reaction of a machine to small perturbations? Like if I unscrew this bolt, how long it will take for a machine to explode? xD
I mean, I'm not an engineer really, but I have experience as a software developer, and subjectively complexity of a code is when you can't predict at all what will happen if you change this line of code. Maybe it can be taken as a basis for a measure?
I mean, your brain has an order of magnitude more neurons than there are people on the planet. I think humans are just incapable of wrapping our heads around the sheer number of tiny things that fit in small macroscopic spaces.
A machine is a device that uses energy to perform work. Typically by applying or transforming force, motion, or both.
The space shuttle can be thought of maybe as a collection of machines working in concert, but thinking of it as ONE machines renders the meaning of machine less useful.
In my understanding a device has its origin in giving advice and does something specific for you (a pen is a writing device, a mixer is a cooking device, a phone is a communication device, a bus is a transportation device etc.).
A machine on the other hand has its roots in its mechanisms. It physically transforms something by applying mechanical power, and that's not necessarily done for you (e.g. printing device VS printing machine).
Whether a device can be composed out of many smaller devices, or whether a machine can be composed out of many smaller machines just doesn't seem to be relevant. That being said, language evolves with time and certain concepts find some overlap in general usage.
Device comes from Latin dividere, meaning "something which is divided". Later with old French devis (disposition, desire, purpose, or decorative emblem) and deviser (arrange, plan). A device is something planned, designed, potentially intricate. A device doesn't always need to be mechanical/physical as there are "literal devices" and one can be "left to their devices". I'd say "device" is more like "a planned thing" if giving a basic definition.
A machine is almost always a device, but a device isn't always a machine. A fancy earring can be a device, but it is clearly not a machine.
I've been reading Dashiell Hammett detective stories from the early 1920s and it seems like cars were almost exclusively referred to colloquially as 'machines' back then.
Wrt the space shuttle, I would take some issue because you could say it's not just one machine, but a collection of many, for example it probably has onboard computer systems that are not always in use. It would be a bit like saying that a whole factory is "a machine". Whereas the ASML devices serve one single clear purpose.
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/
There's a thing in writing where you can make bold claims in order to give the reader an idea about what the rest of the article is going to be about - that's whats happening here, a bit of editorializing .. but do you know of a more complex machine than the ASML/TSMC production line, in terms of inputs/outputs?
I think, if one were used to calculating cyclomatic complexity, such a headline is not only amusing, but also fascinating even if it is 'wrong' by .. some value system .. because the thought exercise to come up with a more cyclomatically complex machine, is rather a fruitful challenge. And that is why writers should be allowed to editorialize, because .. after all .. this is a thought-provoking article, isn't it ..
For this thought experiment I would welcome you to contribute another measure besides cyclomatic complexity as a means of ascertaining the truth of the matter, because after all complexity is multi-dimensional, but on the basis of number of actual things that have to be qualitatively measured in order for the machine to function as intended, I can think of a few other big machines that would be in scope, but - as a person who does complex systems work professionally - I'm pretty sure that the editorializing was a way to kick off some neurons in the intended audience, and not much more than that.
However, let us continue to postulate there are other forms of complexity that can be measured - what would you suggest are the other 3 or 4 contenders for the title?
As the the comment you're replying to just said, A) it's qualitative and B) it's perfectly fine to glaze the subject a bit in journalistic writing. It gives the article a quick hook to get readers interested, and if you actually read the article it becomes the least interesting thing about it.
And now that I've said that: I'd argue that if you consider the full "embodied complexity" of this machine's product lifecycle, it's hard to think of much else that compares to it. E.g., consider not just the machine itself, but also all of the R&D needed to get it to this point, and the amount of field experience necessary to make maintainable and reliable, and the engineering and supply-chain work necessary so that you can reliably ship them to customers around the world? While still being far, far ahead of all your competitors?
>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 ;)
Many modern electronics still contain a vacuum because MEMS gyroscopes use a high vacuum.
The search response also said MEMS oscillators (modern performance replacements for quartz crystals) use a high vacuum but given the iPhone 8 was famously "bricked" by Helium affecting a MEMS oscillator - I'm unsure about that!
MEMS oscillators do use a vacuum, and that's why they're susceptible to helium. A helium atom is tiny compared to an oxygen or nitrogen atom, and can leak through many otherwise-perfect seals.
So, a (badly-designed) MEMS oscillator is basically a region of vacuum enclosed by a membrane that only helium can permeate. Of course exposing it to helium is going to permanently change its behavior! Once the helium gets in, there's no reason for it to leave, due to the vastly higher atmospheric pressure outside.
Very interesting. Good info about both the gyroscopes and oscillators. I didn't know that much progress had been made.
I remember when MEMS started getting capable of micro fluid handling, but wasn't aware of what they were doing with "lack of fluid" :)
Really bringing the little vacuum chambers out of the big vacuum chamber and onto the street.
Over the decades I have often thought about doing something like that, but not really micro.
Now I'm suspicious about something I hadn't considered before at a previous employer's chem lab. Last month when they called me back in, there was inconsistent oscillation being applied (sometimes not) to a key analog sensor on one instrument which is about the same vintage as the iPhone 6 where the problem showed up from the early MEMS oscillators. These instruments have been there for over a decade and it may be some other electronic problem, but this does coincide with a couple additional gas analyzers they brought in a few months ago which are now wasting about 5x more helium than I was using when I was controlling it. Exhausting into one lab, but not having a completely isolated ventilation system.
Now I know something to try next time and that's not even why they called me in this time.
This could actually be one of those problems that shows up intermittently depending on which way the "wind" blows ;)
Sometimes the best way to fix things is to wait until you're smarter :0
Great piece, I definitely enjoyed reading through it.
I don't have a question about ASML or the machine in particular, but I am curious about your thoughts on something: I've recently noticed a fair bit of media (blogs, YouTube videos, TikTok clips) about the same thing: this machine and the EUV process. Do you think interest in this topic is just a coincidence or did something happen to cause these different content creators and authors to do a piece on it at around the same time? What caused you to do a piece on this now?
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 was.
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.
Don't have it in front of me so I can't comment on the actual language, but wasn't ENIAC designed for the purpose of firing tables, but the time it was "completed" got used for e.g. H-bomb?
Yes. The statement in Chip War, like many others, is close to correct but still wrong. When a book gets many things wrong in an area that I know, it makes me worry about its accuracy in areas that I don't know. (See Gell-Mann Amnesia.)
Every part of this technology is astounding and you need a reasonable basis in physics to truly appreciate just how astounding it is. And the tolerances are so ridiculously precise, it boggles the mind.
Even before you get to the lithography machine you need silicon. For a long time we've known how this is done. You create what's called a boule, which is where you create a cylinder of almost pure silicon by seeding molten silicon with a crystal and slowly forming it. You then cut the boule into the silicon discs we often see. That machining and polishing itself has to be super-precise.
But I can remember when the tolerance for impurities was at 1 part per 300 million. I read recently that even 1 part per billion is now too impure. And that makes sense. The biggest chips are what? 80 billion transistors? I seem to remember NVidia makes chips in that range (or rather TSMC does for NVidia). At 1ppb that might make ruining your chip just too likely.
So my point is that there's a whole industry to make super-pure silicon which itself took amazing advancements and without that this machine would be a lot less useful.
Another part that amazes me is just how pervasive multiple layers on chips have become. I can remember when that was novel. The upper layers are made by cheaper machines with EUV reserved for a transistor "base layer" where all the interconnects really are.
It's amazing just how many problems had to be solved to make this posible.
Yeah… when I’m eating breakfast, a lecture is not what I’m after. I watched that Veritasium video a while back and was glued to it. Any other presentation style and I probably would have completely skipped it (thinking I’ll watch it another time knowing I would never go back to it).
(The video describes the actual lithographic laser.)
And it's a source of serious hazardous waste products. It's a tin-ion laser, operating in an ultra-pure vacuum, on an unbelievably high-energy band (even laser "lines" have definable bandwidths). There's really not a lot of wiggle room in materials selection for the laser.
ASML are not the chokepoint for chips. Zeiss are. ASML can hire more engineers and build more machines. Zeiss cannot hire more mirror grinders. And noone wants to train as one.
Uncertain long-term career prospects that depend on a single employer. If you pay enough to make long-term prospects irrelevant, you may end up attracting the wrong kind of people. People who can't be trained do the job well enough, or people who will quit after earning enough. And you may end up losing your existing employees. They may quit if they don't get paid as much as the new hires, or they may FIRE if they do.
How come FAANG companies don't have this same problem of people quitting after earning enough? They get paid much more, even without taking on the risk of being tied to a single employer.
The answer is that some people do quit and retire early, but even more are attracted to that career like moths to a flame, and work until they can't.
I do think they should raise pay for their existing employees at the same time. In fact, they should tie the compensation to progression in skill and experience, so that people who just came for the money and aren't cut out for the work or aren't in it for the long haul aren't attracted to the job. That's basically the traditional model anyway.
And yeah paying employees well might cost a bit of money (but really, not that much in the scope of things). If talent is their production bottleneck, it will be well worth the expense.
It's a more diverse industry with many companies and many types of jobs. If you don't like one job, you can quit and try another. Which people tend to do multiple times in their careers.
Software industry has always been plagued by attrition. Some companies pay well and mostly employ younger people. Older employees eventually filter out, either because they have already earned enough and prefer better work-life balance, or due to ageism. And then there are occasional downturns, where many people lose their jobs, can't find new ones, and end up leaving the industry permanently.
People generally prefer careers with multiple viable employers. Not just in the world, but also in the same metro area. That way you are less likely to get stuck in a job you don't like. But if you are an employer with unique requirements. Of skills that take years to learn and that people are not likely to acquire on their own. Then you may need to pay ridiculous money (more like AI than FAANG) to substantially widen your talent pipeline. And if you pay ridiculous money, you risk ridiculous consequences.
It sounds like you're arguing that Zeiss needs to pay even more than FAANG to succeed in attracting people to work for them, which is a point that I agree with.
Surely you would increase the salary of the current employees if you're hiring new people with higher salaries.
Also, it sounds like the entire premise is "people don't want to work because they're not being paid enough" which is enough of a good reason by itself.
It is unavoidable that, at some point, China will have its own matching or better machine because they obviously how incredibly strategically important it is.
“Retaining the best workers is especially crucial in an area like photolithography, where a huge amount of tacit knowledge is used to assemble its machines. An ASML engineer once told He Rongming, the founder of Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment, one of China’s top ASML competitors, that the company wouldn’t be able to replicate ASML’s products even if it had the blueprints. He suggested that ASML’s products reflected ‘decades, if not centuries’ of knowledge and experience. ASML’s Chinese competitors have systematically attempted to hire former ASML engineers, and there is at least one documented case of a former ASML employee unlawfully handing over proprietary information. But none of this appears to have narrowed the gap.”
Non-zero chances - yes. Unavoidable - I wouldn't be so sure. I can't imagine how many top human-hours and cutting-edge inventions involved to construct this machine. And much of this simply cannot be stolen or bought, no matter how much money you have.
It has never happened in the history of the world that a company or country could maintain its technological advance indefinitely.
Either China will catch up on this or that particular technology will become obsolete. But it is certain that they won't stay behind forever (measured in a small number of decades at most).
There is no doubt that less than 10 years will be needed for China to be able to do something equivalent to what the ASML machines can do now.
What is far less certain is what ASML will be able to do at that time, i.e. if they will be able to progress significantly over the state-of-the-art of today, or they will reach a plateau.
Besides China, there is a renewed effort in Japan to become competitive again, so ASML may face in the future both Chinese and Japanese competitors.
This is kind of like saying you can prove everyone dies based on the evidence that everyone who is not currently alive has died.
You might place an upper limit using history but in this case I'd guess that limit would end up being much larger than the present semiconductor industry itself might last.
I'd say it is more likely than within 20 years the domestic Chinese semiconductor industry will be state-of-the-art across the full vertical and horizontal range.
There is a level of arrogance in the West that China does cheap but simple/low quality whereas this is only a stepping stone along the way. German car manufacturers went into China during the 90s with that mindset, and expecting it was forever, well they don't think that anymore...
I mean you’ve definitely just had technology disappear though, usually because of war. Damascus Steel was a lost military tech. We could certainly end up just accidentally (or worse, intentionally) bomb this stuff out of existence so nobody has it.
One can ballpark it, during EUV commercialization, ASML had 15k employees, Zeiss 3k, Cymer 1k. 20 years of non priority commercial development, lots of setbacks. Final integration ~5k suppliers. For reference commercial aviation Boeing/Airbus with as 100k employees, 50k suppliers. And we don't even know it's correct technical roadmap. Initially they thought synchrotron better than plasma/LPP but went with latter because synchrotron too expensive, now EUV machine prices ballooned to multiple synchrotron price. Don't be surprise if we find it dead end non competitive tech in 5-10 years if PRC or JP figures out SSMB/FEL etc, LPP may become economically uncompetitive and all ASML EUV becomes stranded assets. This real possibly because while ASML LPP works, it works at far higher cost than original projections, i.e. it's overbudget techstack with lethal scaling costs.
On paper EUV relatively modest undertaking vs commercial aviation, EUV deeper integration vs commercial aviation breadth, but in terms of scale of effort for nation state coordination, EUV probably all things considered, easier to replicate because it has no regulatory slowdown, it's purely host country physics problem. Having enough talent and throwing it at problem x espionage x poaching talent x time will likely solve precision physics problem sooner than later. Vs commercial aviation which has complicated geopolitical/regulatory hurdles and magnitude more suppliers and scale. TLDR EUV has smaller organizational surface area for determined state to pursue through concentrating $$$, talent and effort. You can buy a ex ASML to bootstrap EUV development, much harder to get globe to buy COMAC without decades of airworthiness. There's a reason western analysts predict PRC EUV in 2030s (meanwhile PRC already beat prototype estimate timeline), but probably not realistic for global COMAC in same timeframe, and PRC been hammering at commercial aviation seriously long before EUV.
That's the key - if it was done once, it can be done again, and likely it's going to be significantly cheaper/easier because it's known it can be done. We see this from olympic records (e.g., the 4 minute mile was a "barrier" until one day it was passed and suddenly a bunch of people passed it).
Of course, doing it "legally" is another question - someone in the US trying to replicate would likely run into patent and other issues.
But a top-secret Manhattan-style project done by the US or China? definitely doable, and if you add spy-shit in, perhaps even faster.
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?
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.
- 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
That's the edge of what's possible, it's quite common even for researchers to have problems replicating results at the edge.
There's sometime implicit knowledge in a technique that either doesn't get written down, or someone is so good at something you don't think certain details will matter.
In my old lab (biochemistry) some people just have good hands and are really good at making something repeatable, others not so much.
The straregic importance is vastly over hyped. Maybe by people who want to sell chips. Actual physical feature size shrinkage rate has dramatically slowed from maybe a decade ago. making more efficient algorithms or architectures will beat out trying to fight physics.
> 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?
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.
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.
Every country tries to claim critical dependency for innovations. I guess you parochially mention that one because you remember that narrative (maybe because it makes you feel better).
I maliciously searched for examples of the French thinking they invented the transistor.
Turns out the French do have a claim of inventing it simultaneously (at the same time as Bell) and the French even commercialised their version since their tech had different parameters (Apparently it was two German inventors working for Westinghouse in France on a project for French telecoms as I recall). The history of invention/commercialisation is usually wierd.
>Apparently it was two German inventors working for Westinghouse in France on a project for French telecoms as I recall
So the Germans invented it! JK
I like how you put this. It always seems weird to me how some people get hung up on these claims when it's so obvious that history is full of basically simultaneous inventions.
Except ASML licensed the technology from the US Government, after the government labs built the first EUV fab in 2001. Not to take anything away from ASML...all the US companies that also licensed the tech failed to commercialize it, but the US Government blocked Canon and other Japanese companies from acquiring the technology. The entire reason ASML has the technology and nobody in Japan does is geopolitical.
> Would we sooner have 10 additional ASMLs or waste a lot of resources?
It seems obvious that the answer would be both? All of these things are "bets", at almost every level.
What happens is someone comes along and notices the 9/10 failed attempts and decides that the right thing to do is only to make bets which are guaranteed to win. So they get smaller and smaller.
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...
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.
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.
Patents are supposed to be the antidote to industrial secrets. Of course, it doesn't really work out that way because in addition to patent writers hiding the ball or strategically layering patents and secrecy, things like tacit knowledge and organization play a huge role in exploring, building, and applying solutions. FOSS doesn't really help with the tacit stuff. It's partly why it's so difficult for projects to survive after the original authors move on. With software that's not necessarily immediately fatal as long as the software works well and is easy enough to tweak around the edges to keep it compiling and interfacing well, qualities which FOSS is meant to foster and preserve. But outside software, and especially in the industrial sphere, the loss of that tacit knowledge and organization is often immediately fatal. You can't just copy stuff, you have to rebuild all that tacit knowledge and process. Often times, like in software, the resulting product that nominally achieves the same results is built around an entirely different technical approach.
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 ..
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.
> If everyone could make these machines, there'd be more of these machines.
My post is in violent agreement with this, for this generation of machines.
ASML spends ~$5B annually on R&D with the expectation that they will be able to make ~30% net profit in the future. If you remove patent protection, there will be more competition and obviously profit margins will fall.
I want to rephrase that for emphasis. The point of aa-jv's post was that we would get cheaper chips by invalidating IP. Cheaper chips means lower margins (because you have not lowered input prices). Lower margins was the explicit goal, so to the extent that the changes in IP law work, you will get lower margins for companies like ASML.
At that point, you have a field of companies looking at (say) 10% net returns, still needing to invest billions of new capital into R&D every year. Worse: no patents means that Company A could spend $5B on R&D and Company B could spend $0, and both of them could reap the benefits of that $5B by Company A. So it's not even necessarily clear that the industry would see much net innovation.
Are we even certain there are companies who would enter this capital-intensive business assuming IP was free? Compulsory licensing is a thing, but I am not aware of that even being something that has been requested.
I find this paragraph to be odd: "Wavelengths as low as 13.5 nanometers can achieve more precise patterns in a single exposure. In fact, extreme ultraviolet lithography can combine three or four photolithography patterning cycles into a single one on a seven-nanometer node. Without EUV, producing five-nanometer nodes might require as many as one hundred different steps."
But a five-nanometer node has a gate pitch of 45nm and a metal pitch of 20nm! Using different forms of the word "nanometer" in the same paragraph is very confusing...
I thought the power grid is the most complex machine. The power grid is a gigantic machine spanning a country or significant parts of a country. It includes all the power production plants, millions of miles of transmission and distribution lines, substations for transmission and distribution, and billions of devices consuming power for residential and industrial use. The grid ensures these billions of devices are operating at 60 Hz frequency—all the time. The grid's primary function is to maintain this frequency, no matter what.
My understanding is step size has divergred from physical feature size for the past decade or so eg. 3 nm step (marketing) may actually be 42 nm physical. so in other words progress has slowed (diminishing returns to inverse scaling)
> 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 me two very important things and little else by comparison: that the machines are ultimately fragile and nowhere near "optimised", since the complexity is by own admission substantial to put it mildly; the machine is not a commodity, exactly, one of the million pieces breaking subtly likely renders it inoperable; its cost is proportional to its complexity (read: astronomic); by mere fact it's a focal point of geopolitics only supports the rest of the argument it's a machine of current stone age much like siege engines were at some point the closely guarded secret win-or-lose multiplers of feudal culture.
I mean it's certainly interesting to read about the complexity, but reducing the complexity and commoditising the whole thing is what's really going to be impressive I think :-)
I am probably speaking out against the nerd in us, and none of what I said should detract from enjoying the article or the subject, it's just that I think complexity here is the giveaway of us not having conquered UVL exactly, not quite yet :-) Or maybe we lack the right materials which would allow us to reduce the machine or make it less complex or prone to calibration related errors.
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.
> reducing the complexity and commoditising the whole thing is what's really going to be impressive I think
What do you think "cutting edge" is, or Moore's law has been?
At one point you could have written a similar article about, say, 165nm, which is now going to the scrapyard. In the past these things have always gradually got more available and easier, with higher yields - but a new, better one appears.
But at some point we're going to reach an equilibrium with physics itself. Where, even with all the complexity we can muster, it's not possible to make it easier or get smaller.
Indeed, all this reminds me of the marvel that is mechanical timekeeping - incredibly complex engineering that would ultimately be surpassed by dirt cheap electronics.
What is the corresponding revolution in chip production? I imagine something like FPGAs for litography - a wafer that can somehow work on another wafer in a sandwich-like configuration. Such a process could potentially improve on each iteration and thus get very good, very fast.
If there's really such a bottleneck around ASML, why not design some extra chips for legacy processes that presumably already have well known design workflows?
I mean we're not talking AMD FX and Core 2 Duo here, it's Raptor Lake and Zen 3, it's perfectly viable and still being sold in droves right now.
That’s what the likes of AMD with their chiplet design have been doing.
There’s also the issue of older process nodes not being profitable enough anymore, which explaines why at the height of the chip supply crunch older ARM chips were in short supply but there was ample stock of the 20nm feature-sized RP2040.
This is gonna sound super dumb, but I'm not sure how they aren't being profitable if there are shortages, just price things beyond break even level? The average person can't even tell the difference between a Core 5 and a Core 5 Ultra, you can practically sell them at the same price and I'm not even sure they'd notice when actually using them. The performance jump is relatively minor and the bottlenecks are elsewhere.
It mostly comes down to the consumer market not being significant enough by itself. A consumer may not notice a 10% increase in performance per watt or dollar. A large office building probably will, and a datacenter definitely will.
I don't think I'm being entirely hyperbolic when I say the consumer market only exists to put devices that can connect to and feed the datacenter loads into the general populations hands.
Part of those prices aren't something the manufacturer can adjust. Whether you're building 60nm or 20nm chips, you need pretty much the same silicon wafers, the same ultra pure water, the same chemicals and the same personnel. And as a bonus, you're not gonna be getting as many of the same chips on that wafer.
And sure, a chip layout can be shrunk; but that requires a whole new recertification cycle.
Isn't exactly this what China is doing? Apart from poaching ex ASML employees? Now reaching 7nm, and just throwing up more energy to catch up in FLOPS like Jensen said?
Because very large share of market now are datacenters. Difference from desktop is dramatic - for desktop really acceptable very simple chips with bad energy efficiency, but DCs already deal with extremely high power consumption, as they typically "compress" so much consumption in one rack, that constantly working near to physical constraints.
You can't make desktop computer 4 times larger but there's very little preventing you form putting 4 racks where you had 1 before. If the floor space is the expensive part of data center then probably some incentives are misaligned.
For about price of land and connectivity - in large city land price begin on few millions dollars per square kilometer, and usage of cable channels could cost from 50$ per meter (easy could be 200$/m).
Plus, space arrange could last years.
Heat dissipation in range of megawatts could be just prohibited by local regulations.
So, space in large cities is very serious problem, and for business it is usually easier to "compress" as much computing power as possible in one rack.
AMD hiding Threadripper behind their back: Uh yeah what a terrible idea, we definitely didn't actually do that. Making a CPU that's twice the size, how ridiculous would that be right?!
You cannot place dc anywhere, in large cities space is extremely constrained, and land is extremely expensive.
Also big problem - connectivity - you cannot place DC where it cannot be connected to power grid and to very powerful network.
So yes, DC floor space is severely limited.
And the third issue - last decades, rack servers dissipate extremely large amounts of heat, I hear numbers up to tens Kilowatts per rack, which is just hard to dissipate with air cooling (as example, all IBM Power servers have option of liquid cooling, but this is totally different price range).
That's the AI hype narrative, but aren't server CPUs only like 25% of the total market? That's tiny compared to consumer volume, though revenue is likely on par given the higher cost per unit.
> aren't server CPUs only like 25% of the total market?
Yes and no. If just formally calculate, yes, servers are small market volumes. But, they are much less constrained financially, than private person, so from same fab one could earn much more money if sell to server market, than if sell to consumer market.
I don't think that's correct, server chips aren't really "more expensive" than consumer chips when you correctly account for performance. Older-gen server chips have comparable performance to new top-of-the-line consumer chips and sell for a similar price. Newer-gen server chips in turn are priced at a premium over the current value of the older-gen, to account for their higher performance. The lower financial constraints don't enter into it all that much.
For many years until about a decade ago (more precisely until the launch of the Intel Skylake Server processors) the server CPUs had a performance per dollar comparable to desktop CPUs so the expensive server CPUs were expensive because of their higher performance.
But since then the prices of server CPUs have ballooned and now their performance per dollar is many times worse than for desktop CPUs. Server CPUs have very good performance per watt, but the same performance per watt is achieved with desktop CPUs by underclocking them.
The only advantage of server CPUs is that they aggregate in a single socket the equivalent of many desktop CPUs, including not only the aggregate number of cores, but also the aggregate number of memory channels and the aggregate number of PCIe lanes. Thus a server computer becomes equivalent with a cluster of desktop computers that would be interconnected by network interfaces much faster than the typically available Ethernet links.
While for embarrassingly parallel tasks a server computer will cost many times more than a cluster of desktop computers with the same performance, it will have a much less disadvantage or it might even have a better performance/cost ratio for tasks with a lot of interprocess/interthread communication, where the tight coupling between the many cores hosted by the same socket ensures a lower latency and a higher throughput for such communication.
The owners of datacenters are willing to pay the much higher prices of modern server CPUs because the consolidation into a single server of multiple old servers brings economies in other components, due to less coolers, less power supplies, less racks, simpler maintenance and administration, etc.
While the prices of server CPUs at retail are huge, the biggest costumers, like cloud owners, can get very large discounts, so for them the difference in comparison with desktop CPUs is not as great as for SMEs and individuals. The large discounts that Intel was forced to accept during the last few years, to avoid losing too much of the market to AMD, were the cause why Intel's server CPU division has lost many billions of $.
I usually hear it as "one of the most expensive single projects" rather than the most complex. I'd bet there any many more complex, the LHC comes to mind.
In terms of precission engineering LHC is for sure more complex. But then again ISS is made out of many life-critical systems. In safety critical systems a the actual hardware may look simpler in some ways than stuff you see on the bleeding edge for that category of product, but then the complexity is in turning it into something that can be safety certifiable. Just different math entirely.
ie there's lots of fun applications for radar, some of them have very complex math involved in manufacturing processes. Then you got automotive radar, you mainly need to get the position and velocity of some objects, the math is simpler. But you have to certify that stuff for ASIL-D, no one makes you ASIL-D radars, so you combine multiple radars. 3'Bs make a D as the saying goes.. Then you gotta worry about BOM costs because you want to ship 10 million cars..
Gemini tells me: calling an ASML machine a "giant refrigerator" is actually a pretty sophisticated observation. While it doesn't store milk, a massive portion of that plumbing is dedicated to thermal management and vacuum systems. (...)
"and vacuum systems" is the key here. The refrigeration is a well-solved issue.
There's impeller-type vacuum engines, which is what most people think about.
Then there's multiple-stage fans, where the purpose is to overcome random atomic vectors: an atom flying the wrong direction is more likely than not to hit a fan blade and bounce vaguely toward the output direction. Extra stages increase the odds of outward vectors, instead of rebounding off walls in some unhelpful direction. These are needed when the pressure is already so low that gas atoms don't hit each other, so they act like particles instead of gases.
There's also molecular getter pumps, that are reactive coatings inside the vacuum. Their purpose is to permanently adhere any stray molecules that tend to cling to surfaces (like H2O), so they won't eventually decouple and ruin the vacuum.
Each is used to reach increasing levels of "vacuum", which is more like "single-molecule denial gates" at that point.
I have an interesting discussion with a senior colleague: why ASML? why are they by far the best? Their competitors are a few generations behind.
The colleague claimed that there is no special magic. It's not that ASML is using some otherwise unknown laws of physics nor is any single step or component particularly special or novel. It's just that they meticulously optimized each step, and the sum of such steps is the winning solution.
In fact, this is probably why it's so hard to copy ASML. If there was a single magic component, a single or few engineers could be poached away to a competitor to copy it. However, copying a well-optimized company with many simultaneous optima is a much harder task.
Our discussion was in the context of why our quant hedgefund competitor was performing so well, far above the market norm. By nature and design, quant finance is an incredibly efficient field (and most techniques are more or less known by veterans), and we had thought unlikely that one fund could do so much better. Our conclusion was that this fund must be the well-optimized ASML of our field. My colleague happened to know the founder and indeed that was his personal impression as well.
The best explanation as to why ASML is so dominant is that they have locked out the best suppliers by signing exclusivity deals with them. If you want to compete with ASML you have to vertically build: the best lenses, the best lasers, the best metrology. A new entrant would need to replace ten different world-class vendors simultaneously. Unlike common business wisdom that dictates having multiple suppliers to mitigate risk, ASML succeeds by identifying the best supplier in the world for each critical component—such as Zeiss for optics or their specific metrology group—and securing exclusive, multi-year deals with them.
Dan Gelbart gives exactly this view in a podcast he took part: https://youtu.be/UTgrWmOk4q8?si=Zp13SPqN_Vx-kFlq&t=1564
It does seem like the USG should fund a few $10B to build out the alternative stack, given the strategic sensitivity. Best time to have started would have been 20y ago, second best is today.
This is small change in the military budget.
The US Government made ASML dominant when it allowed it to acquire (US Company) Cymer, Inc.- the company that was best in the world at the time at EUV. Merging Cymer's EUV work with ASML's meticulous perfection and delivery of the entire rest of the system is what made them the only vendor that matters for semiconductor manufacturers.
This acquisition is also what gives the US Government the ability to veto customers of ASML even today- this is why Chinese semiconductor manufacturing is so far behind, because the USG controls who can access ASML's EUV work.
TIL! I had assumed that veto was purely diplomatic muscle.
That seems like a potentially very cunning soft takeover, in that case.
Still, I think onshoring is strategically wise in a world where the US is actively antagonizing the EU.
Why would the US need to fund and build out an alternative stack? ASML is de facto controlled by the United States.
Of course, having competitors is probably a good thing...
Carl Zeiss only has a €2.2B market cap. What stops someone from just buying all these world class vendors?
Carl Zeiss Meditec /= Carl Zeiss. $AFX is the publicly traded non-semis division. Carl Zeiss AG is the parent company which is private
Correct. Funny enough though, their corporate structure and the name AG means they do have stocks, but they are not traded and 100% privately owned. For some reason I see this often with German companies, e.g. the German railway. Not sure why that is, although for the railway plausible since they are owned by the state that might eventually want to sell parts of it.
Zeiss and Schott are both owned in their entirety by a foundation that is not allowed to sell shares. Most of the dividends go to larger research institutions in southern Germany (about $80 million to Heidelberg, Stuttgart, Tübingen, Freiburg, Ulm, Mainz, Jena).
I believe the two applicable options to have a company that counts as its own "person" is either AG or GmbH (~= LLC / "limited").
There is also SE which is a EU form for an AG, and various "partnership" forms that involve a partner that's fully liable. Usually, that partner is not an actual person but a "legal person", i.e. another SE or GmbH.
Even if you're not listed on a stock market, you might want to take on investments, e.g. "give me 10 million for 5% of the company" and I assume the latter is much easier with an AG.
An AG corporation has stocks in order to track who owns how much and also attach different economic and voting rights to different classes of stock. The other way to incorporate a limited-liability company in Germany is the GmbH, which tracks ownership directly in the articles of incorporation, but are in other ways subject to way lower management, disclosure and accounting requirements. So the AG is mostly useful if you want it to be easy to change your ownership structure, if you for instance raise capital from new investors, issue employee shares, change cross-ownership within a conglomerate or go public some day.
Why Carl Zeiss is an AG I don't know. The West German Carl Zeiss was re-formed as a GmbH in 1946, but had changed to an AG by 1973. The East German Carl Zeiss was turned into a GmbH during reunification and then split in two. One part merged into the West German Carl Zeiss AG and the other is now called Jenoptik. Jenoptik was converted into an AG in 1996 and went public in 1998. AFAICT Carl Zeiss has been privately owned by the Carl Zeiss-Stiftung since 1889, except of course for the temporary East German part.
You create a German AG entity to make it easier to onboard new shareholders/offboard old shareholders.
In most entity types, this involves a lot of paperwork while its quite easy within an AG.
AG does not mean necessarily its publicly traded.
AFAIK that’s how incorporated companies work in Europe.
Here in Sweden we have A LOT of companies own and operated by state and local government and they’re all “aktiebolag” which literally translates to “stock companies”. For smaller businesses you can register as a sole proprietor and some other odd structures if you are a group of people. You’ll often see the same thing for non-profits as well.
Isn't that commonly called anti-competitive practices?
It would fall under the category of exclusive dealing.(1) Exclusive dealing is never per se illegal, but it can be as a matter of judgment before a court.
ASML would argue that it's legitimately justified because
The affordance of a monopoly also prevents free riding. ASML and Zeiss spent billions of dollars and decades co-developing very specific, custom-tailored technology. If a competitor could simply walk up to Zeiss and buy the lenses that ASML spent billions helping to develop, the competitor would be free riding on ASML's investment - and creating a chilling effect for future innovation.(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_dealing
C is just a business decision - exclusivity due to need, not contract.
yes, but it has been given the blessing by the western governments.
Interesting. This observation only reinforces the hypothesis that my colleague had. Well optimized components procured with exclusivity.
> best suppliers by signing exclusivity deals with them
In the UK, if you are a supplier and lock in an exclusivity deal, and also you are small business, they don't treat you as legitimate business and company revenue gets taxed as employment income (IR35).
I wonder why regulators don't look into that. If they have exclusive deal, are they really in business or is it just some sort of tax structure masqueraded as supply chain?
It's hard to qualify Zeiss as a "small business". Also, they pay their own employees wages and deduct taxes and social insurance so it's not like they pretend to be an independent contractor to save some money.
Technology can explain why ASML or other companies are dominant at a given moment but it can't explain how it became dominant. Essentially, technological superiority involves research and that requires money. IE, it is a product of investment in the various technologies.
The history of ASML involves a "failed" company that other multinationals felt they had to keep alive to allow the technologies to continue. And that's saying that the capital investment needed to produce a thing of that scale can't work if it is subject to a yearly profit cycle (or works much more poorly).
The further factor shaping ASML is that as chip technology has grown, the investment required for support technology has grown and so only a single supplier can remain profitable and it seem logical there would only be a single company acting as supplier (maintaining research and expertise in two or three huge companies, only one of which can be profitable at a time, is highly inefficient - why we're done down to 1-3 cutting edge chip makers at this point also).
So ASML was economically logical and it being in Europe is perhaps a combination of European tradition and Europe wanting some part of the global chip production system (which is by a fair bit the largest/most-valuable concentration of capital and technology in the world).
https://medium.com/@crcjeffkim/why-these-5-acquisitions-have...
ASML is in Europe because Philips/NXP is in Europe. The fundamental research EUV is based on was done in the US, then made available to industry via a holding company called EUV, LLC. Intel tried to bring in Canon and Nikon, but was rejected by the US government. Two others were approved, ASML and an American company called SVG. ASML spent a couple decades doing the incredibly hard work of productizing EUV and acquired SVG along the way. Canon and Nikon tried playing catch-up with an Asian consortium, but arrived late to the party.
> it being in Europe is perhaps a combination of European tradition and Europe wanting some part of the global chip production system
The US doesn't randomly hold export veto power on ASML through unilateral threats. EUV had a lot of tech transfer from the US of the initial research as the sibling comment lays out, and the agreements for those transfers allowed restrictions.
ASLM have put massive financial investment into getting where they are including raising money from customers like Intel in return for shares. Also, form wikipedia "employs more than 42,000 people.. and relies on a network of nearly 5,000 tier 1 suppliers". It's going to be a lot of time and money to match that.
Veritasium has a nice video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0
Obviously, there are a lot of reasons why. But it boils down to having the vision, the belief and the strength to follow through over many years. It's important to not confound vision with random Kool-Aid. Instead it's grounded in research. That research is itself grounded in a strong vision and belief — it got laughed by the entire physics community at the time:
> 'people seemed unwilling to believe bending x-rays, and they tended to that we had actually made an image by regard the whole thing as a big fish story
Now contrast this with the current academic reality — "publish or perish" and the reality of venture financing and corporate culture that "depends" (arguably in self-inflicted manner, that's not 100% the case) on quarterly repots.
ASML is just a recent story, but if you look back, you'll see that most revolutions have a similar pattern of people crazy enough to deviate from the herd.
The rest— the immense financial risk, the 5000 suppliers, etc. came as a result of having the ability to see through all the noise and the grit to to follow through when everyone calls you an idiot for not doing something "useful"
One could argue that NVidia's advantage comes from a similar vision epiphany that led to them developing CUDA years before it was viable. The result is similar.
I'm tempted to call that pure luck. As far as they knew, crypto would be the killer app.
However, if you start with the assumption that at some point, people are going to need a lot of fast parallel compute for something, you could rationally justify their long-term strategy. They skated where the proverbial puck was going. They couldn't see the puck, but they were pretty sure there was one. In hindsight that really does look like a safe bet.
People were (ab)using OpenGL to run compute on GPUs in 2004-2006, doing stuff like rendering 2 triangles covering the whole screen and then doing the actual compute in the pixel shaders, getting 10x speedups over CPUs for some problems.
NVIDIA just had their eyes open to an obvious market demand and made it easier by creating CUDA.
Nvidia subsidized machine learning research for years (both with CUDA, hardware donations and developing what was a very niche product line just for them) before deep learning became big, much less the advent of LLMs.
Certainly Jensen seemed to have an extremely long view on this burgeoning machine learning market in the early 2010's.
It didn’t hurt that they had a two companies named Intel and Microsoft that completely missed the boat where GPUs or mobile computing were concerned both are currently the top two companies in tech today by market cap?
CUDA came out of the need for running parallel cores in their GPUs. This is not luck, it's product evolution. They did it first, they did it best, and they are reaping the benefits. The alternative here is to Not have CUDA and continue writing sub-optimal code for GPUs.
it's hard to recommend Veritasium on this subject when Asianometry exists... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFsn1CUyXWs&list=PLKtxx9TnH7...
Very true one thing you have to be impressed with is ASML willingness over time to iterate and iterate again nose to the grindstone. More companies could learn a lesson from that. There were several American companies that had it all in the last 60 years and squandered it. IBM, Xerox, Kodak, US Steel.
Xerox in my time there skewed compensation to the salespeople while turning a blind eye to the software developers who made the sale possible.
> But it boils down to having the vision, the belief and the strength to follow through over many years
And importantly, that vision being correct. The graveyard of history is full of the dedicated yet incorrect.
You can also have the right vision but at the wrong time.
The short answer is they solved something very difficult to accomplish and have a stack of trade secrets as their moat.
The Economist had a good article on this a few years ago: https://www.economist.com/business/2024/01/08/does-europe-at... https://archive.ph/jP1HX
Basically, ASML has an incredible pan-European supply chain of the sort of stuff Europe does best. Deep tech, advanced precision manufacturing, that sort of thing.
I know it's popular to poo-poo Europe around these parts, but those are the sort of thing we genuinely are the best in the world at. Technology isn't just shiny apps and LLMs. It's also this sort of thing, and the shiny LLMs wouldn't work without it.
ASML actually did develop new (understanding of the) laws of physics, the so called Extended Nijboer-Zernike theory in the early 2000's (which extended diffraction optics to work in the high-NA regions relevant to modern lithography) and subsequently patented its application.
Zernike, a Nobel prize winning physicist who worked on optics, was also Dutch, and developed the original Zernike theory of aberrations in the mid 20th century. This was a vast improvement over previous theories as it was far more useful for optical design and analysis.
So the Dutch have a rich history of developing the most advanced physical theories for optical engineering (all the way back to Huygens even)
> It's not that ASML is using some otherwise unknown laws of physics nor is any single step or component particularly special or novel. It's just that they meticulously optimized each step, and the sum of such steps is the winning solution.
Previously in the context of Apple I likened this to becoming a chess grandmaster: all you have to do is make the optimal decision every time you make a move, over and over again, for years
People don't like hearing that there isn't One Weird Trick which you can just copy, but it's the reality of these situations. To the extent that they can be analyzed, the best people to send are often anthropologists to look at the decision making culture. Culture is even harder to copy; this was a factor in the difficulties of TSMC Arizona starting up, despite it being literally the same company it's not the same people.
Is the quant competitor Renaissance? The Medallion Fund?
No, not Rentech. While Rentech is truly marvelous, it has been around for a while. There is a new kid in town, and this kid is very very good. To the point that it drove out other veteran shops out of the same market it traded.
Who is this new kid in town?
QRT?
Which hedgefund?
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"?
It's "complex enough" to be notable for it's complexity and thus a good example for considering the character and economics of complex machinery.
It's kind of pointless to fret about whether it's "the most complex" like there's an objective 1-dimensional ranking that even has utility.
I just watched the Vertasium video[1] on ASML's EUV lithgoraphy machines over the weekend, and I think the qualifier they used was "most complex machine _you can purchase commercially_".
I can't remember if it was an ASML representative that said that, or if it was an overlaid asterisk that popped up on the screen at some point - but I definitely remember thinking about the space shuttle and Saturn V/Apollo and those sorts of things before I saw the qualifier.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0
I‘d probably call it the most complex commercially available machine. You can‘t buy a Space Shuttle, or an LHC. You can buy a TSMC lithography machine, and it‘ll be delivered to you in much the same way as other equipment.
Also, I think the axis it‘s probably most complex on is precision of individual parts and of their combination. Arguably chips themselves are more precise as their 'parts' are so small, but they are much more homogeneous compared to the EUV machine, where tons of different materials and part sizes need to combine.
> You can buy a TSMC lithography machine, and it‘ll be delivered to you in much the same way as other equipment.
Each one of these machines costs half a billion dollars and is protected by some of the most stringent export controls on the planet.
It does raise an interesting philosophical question: if I bolt two ASML lithography machines together, is the resulting machine more complicated?
I asked the ASML rep at KubeCon who they were there for as nobody I knew had a quarter billion to spare. He told me they were just interested customers, but if I didn't want the newest machine I could get one for 70 million euros.
Right but it still gets put into boxes and flown over by a 747. Of course it‘s more complicated than that, but most contenders for complex machines are much more built in-place, and not a complete 'product' being assembled.
I've heard that US nuclear subs actually take the crown, but the design is so secret, that there's no way to verify.
I doubt that anything in the military is that advanced or complex, including nuclear subs.
A big part of it is the secrecy itself. Things get difficult when you can't communicate. Your pool of candidates for the job is limited: you may not want people with foreign connections, some people don't want to work for the military, don't like the paperwork, don't like the idea that they can't value their skills for another job, etc... In addition, military technology is supposed to work on the battlefield, you don't want delicate stuff there, you want rugged, repairable, proven, reliable.
I think the reason secret military stuff appear so advanced, besides the aura it projects, is that it deals with fields that are underrepresented outside of the military. Like stealth for instance. Stealth is of limited use outside of a conflict. So of course, the stealth package of a nuclear submarine will be much more advanced than the almost nonexistant civilian stealth technology. But for things that are relevant to civilians, like the reactors, engines, etc.., I am sure that what's in subs is relatively simple, and probably dated.
> But for things that are relevant to civilians, like the reactors, engines, etc.., I am sure that what's in subs is relatively simple, and probably dated.
It seems like submarine propeller designs are all classified past 1960, even though quiet and efficient propellers pretty relevant to civilian ship design:
https://n5dux.com/taming/
The thing about military stuff is that generally the budget is large and the goal is to design something better than what the enemy has. The civilian world for a long time wasn't willing to blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on ASICs to control phased-array radars; the military was. Now as a result of lots of military investment, the technology is so well-understood that Google put a phased array on a chip inside the front of the Pixel 5.
> In addition, military technology is supposed to work on the battlefield, you don't want delicate stuff there, you want rugged, repairable, proven, reliable.
What you want is stuff that wins fights, and it only needs to be repairable and reliable insofar as it wins fights. The US has the F-22, which is an ultra expensive jet that only has ~60% uptime. In war games, it achieves kill ratios of 100:1, so the military is more than happy to keep it around. When the US raided Osama bin Laden's compound they sent brand new stealth helicopters even though they knew the platform was less reliable.
> In addition, military technology is supposed to work on the battlefield, you don't want delicate stuff there, you want rugged, repairable, proven, reliable.
I used to work for a military contractor.
The stuff we would get back from the field looked like it had been fed through a wood-chipper, and this was peacetime (1980s). They had these special field racks, that had a rackmount suspended inside a huge plastic box (with front and back panels). Didn't save the units inside, though. A lot of time, they were torn off the racks, and rattling around, inside the container.
The kit was not cheap. Our standard units (a super Bearcat Scanner, basically) cost about $40,000 USD (1980s USD). They were 2-4U units, and the racks usually had five or six of them.
There's an urban legend about Admiral Rickover. His office was on the second floor of the Pentagon. If a salesgoblin came in, with sample kit, it was said that he walked over to his window, and dropped it outside. He then said "If it still works, we'll talk."
> I doubt that anything in the military is that advanced
So they are not Cloud-native and there is no Slack?
/s
:-D
An aircraft carrier would like a word.
>> nuclear sub
>aircraft carrier
Having served on both, this is actually a pretty interesting comparison (at least to me).
Carriers are simply larger, so they likely win by scale, but im not sure on a more per-(sub)system basis.
Carriers have a lot of aircraft handling systems that subs dont, elevators and hangers. Also the carrier has group c&c stuff.
Subs have a lot of stealth systems carriers don't, being that they're visible from space. Lots of dive related stuff, o2/co2 handlers.
They both have weapons systems, hvac, propulsion, distillation, steam generators, reactors, air compressor, many others.
Not obvious to me which one is more complex!
Which did you enjoy serving on more? Submariners apparently eat better than anywhere else on the navy, but also don't get any sunlight for 6 months?
Wow, I could not imagine getting this response from someone with real experience! Thanks!!
Depends. Are the aircraft counted?
In either case, the secret design has the same effect, but sub secrets are the top of the top of top secret. Spies that leak sub secrets, spend a long time in Leavenworth.
haha, I actually had exactly this question for myself and I asked Gemini in comparison to Falcon/Musk Rockets.
It said that from a complexity level to construct, the ASML Twin:EXE machine is much more complicated, esp. much more freh research was required to achieve their nanometer structures - a Falcon is a complex vehicle, but compared to "how much do we need to know to create it on an industrial scale",the ASML devices seems to be more complex.
2.5 million moving parts sounds unlikely. Parts, sure. Moving parts, I’m skeptical.
In a vehicle, all the parts are moving
I’m gonna go with the conventional frame of reference: parts moving with respect to each other.
Otherwise we might as well say the ASML machine is in orbit around the galactic center.
There are situations where vehicles have a lot of parts moving with respect to each other, especially rockets.
That claim is from NASA: https://www3.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/pdf/566250main_SHUTTLE...
I see that. And I see it repeated all over. Still skeptical.
Googling for total part count also comes up with the 2.5M number. They move WRT Earth, but the vast majority do not move with respect to each other, is my guess.
For a sanity check comparison: Saturn V estimates are ~5 million total parts, and "tens of thousands" of moving parts. A ratio that sounds sort of normal.
everything can be a moving part if you use enough hydrogen and oxygen
I guess that depends on what is considered moving. A latch is, but is a vibration dampener? On launch, I bet a lot of parts are moving that you probably would not otherwise want to be.
> An orthogonal question is what makes sense as a measure of complexity.
I don't know, but number of parts doesn't seem good. I feel that complexity should be measured in bits, but how to tie it with something real idk. Maybe the amount of knowledge needed to reproduce the machine? It is hard to measure though, because knowledge in people heads can't me measured precisely, we can estimate it but it will be a very rough estimate.
But the knowledge by itself is not enough, because there difficulties when producing that pure knowledge can't solve, they need a specialized equipment or source materials, and arguably it adds to a complexity too.
Or we can try from completely different angle, how about the reaction of a machine to small perturbations? Like if I unscrew this bolt, how long it will take for a machine to explode? xD
I mean, I'm not an engineer really, but I have experience as a software developer, and subjectively complexity of a code is when you can't predict at all what will happen if you change this line of code. Maybe it can be taken as a basis for a measure?
Arguably and it can easily win
Or more complex than, you know, one of the CPUs it can produce, with four billion transistors, which is not "mostly the same thing repeated"?
Off topic: Does it blow anyone else's mind that a DRAM chip has more transistors on it than there are humans on the planet?
>> Off topic: Does it blow anyone else's mind that a DRAM chip has more transistors on it than there are humans on the planet?
Yes.
Accepting these facts is one thing but "getting over the astonishment" never happens for me.
I mean, your brain has an order of magnitude more neurons than there are people on the planet. I think humans are just incapable of wrapping our heads around the sheer number of tiny things that fit in small macroscopic spaces.
[dead]
> NASA says the Space Shuttle has 2.5 million moving parts, while the article says the ASML machine has over 100,000 components.
I don’t know that many people would classify the Space Shuttle as a machine. It doesn’t make anything.
Why would a machine need to make anything? Is a robot arm not a machine? How about a trash compactor? Are the 6 types of simple machines not machines?
A machine is a device that uses energy to perform work. Typically by applying or transforming force, motion, or both.
The space shuttle can be thought of maybe as a collection of machines working in concert, but thinking of it as ONE machines renders the meaning of machine less useful.
In my understanding a device has its origin in giving advice and does something specific for you (a pen is a writing device, a mixer is a cooking device, a phone is a communication device, a bus is a transportation device etc.).
A machine on the other hand has its roots in its mechanisms. It physically transforms something by applying mechanical power, and that's not necessarily done for you (e.g. printing device VS printing machine).
Whether a device can be composed out of many smaller devices, or whether a machine can be composed out of many smaller machines just doesn't seem to be relevant. That being said, language evolves with time and certain concepts find some overlap in general usage.
Device comes from Latin dividere, meaning "something which is divided". Later with old French devis (disposition, desire, purpose, or decorative emblem) and deviser (arrange, plan). A device is something planned, designed, potentially intricate. A device doesn't always need to be mechanical/physical as there are "literal devices" and one can be "left to their devices". I'd say "device" is more like "a planned thing" if giving a basic definition.
A machine is almost always a device, but a device isn't always a machine. A fancy earring can be a device, but it is clearly not a machine.
Why do machines have to "make" things? Is a car not a machine?
I've been reading Dashiell Hammett detective stories from the early 1920s and it seems like cars were almost exclusively referred to colloquially as 'machines' back then.
Steel machines of hell. That’s how I saw them in an editorial work dating back to the early 1900’s talking about the arrival of cars in the city.
Some languages still colloquially refer to cars with the same word used for machine.
A lever is classified as a simple machine.
Wrt the space shuttle, I would take some issue because you could say it's not just one machine, but a collection of many, for example it probably has onboard computer systems that are not always in use. It would be a bit like saying that a whole factory is "a machine". Whereas the ASML devices serve one single clear purpose.
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?
There's a thing in writing where you can make bold claims in order to give the reader an idea about what the rest of the article is going to be about - that's whats happening here, a bit of editorializing .. but do you know of a more complex machine than the ASML/TSMC production line, in terms of inputs/outputs?
I think, if one were used to calculating cyclomatic complexity, such a headline is not only amusing, but also fascinating even if it is 'wrong' by .. some value system .. because the thought exercise to come up with a more cyclomatically complex machine, is rather a fruitful challenge. And that is why writers should be allowed to editorialize, because .. after all .. this is a thought-provoking article, isn't it ..
so it had an unusual amount of inputs and outputs? that's the measure?
For this thought experiment I would welcome you to contribute another measure besides cyclomatic complexity as a means of ascertaining the truth of the matter, because after all complexity is multi-dimensional, but on the basis of number of actual things that have to be qualitatively measured in order for the machine to function as intended, I can think of a few other big machines that would be in scope, but - as a person who does complex systems work professionally - I'm pretty sure that the editorializing was a way to kick off some neurons in the intended audience, and not much more than that.
However, let us continue to postulate there are other forms of complexity that can be measured - what would you suggest are the other 3 or 4 contenders for the title?
Contenders:
ASML: Complexity as a strategic resource
ASML: The most hard to reproduce machine in the world
ASML: One of Europe's most complex strategic resources
> that's the measure?
As the the comment you're replying to just said, A) it's qualitative and B) it's perfectly fine to glaze the subject a bit in journalistic writing. It gives the article a quick hook to get readers interested, and if you actually read the article it becomes the least interesting thing about it.
And now that I've said that: I'd argue that if you consider the full "embodied complexity" of this machine's product lifecycle, it's hard to think of much else that compares to it. E.g., consider not just the machine itself, but also all of the R&D needed to get it to this point, and the amount of field experience necessary to make maintainable and reliable, and the engineering and supply-chain work necessary so that you can reliably ship them to customers around the world? While still being far, far ahead of all your competitors?
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 ;)
Many modern electronics still contain a vacuum because MEMS gyroscopes use a high vacuum.
The search response also said MEMS oscillators (modern performance replacements for quartz crystals) use a high vacuum but given the iPhone 8 was famously "bricked" by Helium affecting a MEMS oscillator - I'm unsure about that!
https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-a-helium-leak-disabled-e...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectromechanical_system_...
MEMS oscillators do use a vacuum, and that's why they're susceptible to helium. A helium atom is tiny compared to an oxygen or nitrogen atom, and can leak through many otherwise-perfect seals.
So, a (badly-designed) MEMS oscillator is basically a region of vacuum enclosed by a membrane that only helium can permeate. Of course exposing it to helium is going to permanently change its behavior! Once the helium gets in, there's no reason for it to leave, due to the vastly higher atmospheric pressure outside.
Very interesting. Good info about both the gyroscopes and oscillators. I didn't know that much progress had been made.
I remember when MEMS started getting capable of micro fluid handling, but wasn't aware of what they were doing with "lack of fluid" :)
Really bringing the little vacuum chambers out of the big vacuum chamber and onto the street.
Over the decades I have often thought about doing something like that, but not really micro.
Now I'm suspicious about something I hadn't considered before at a previous employer's chem lab. Last month when they called me back in, there was inconsistent oscillation being applied (sometimes not) to a key analog sensor on one instrument which is about the same vintage as the iPhone 6 where the problem showed up from the early MEMS oscillators. These instruments have been there for over a decade and it may be some other electronic problem, but this does coincide with a couple additional gas analyzers they brought in a few months ago which are now wasting about 5x more helium than I was using when I was controlling it. Exhausting into one lab, but not having a completely isolated ventilation system.
Now I know something to try next time and that's not even why they called me in this time.
This could actually be one of those problems that shows up intermittently depending on which way the "wind" blows ;)
Sometimes the best way to fix things is to wait until you're smarter :0
Thanks to all for very valuable info and links.
Great piece, I definitely enjoyed reading through it.
I don't have a question about ASML or the machine in particular, but I am curious about your thoughts on something: I've recently noticed a fair bit of media (blogs, YouTube videos, TikTok clips) about the same thing: this machine and the EUV process. Do you think interest in this topic is just a coincidence or did something happen to cause these different content creators and authors to do a piece on it at around the same time? What caused you to do a piece on this now?
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 was.
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.
Don't have it in front of me so I can't comment on the actual language, but wasn't ENIAC designed for the purpose of firing tables, but the time it was "completed" got used for e.g. H-bomb?
Yes. The statement in Chip War, like many others, is close to correct but still wrong. When a book gets many things wrong in an area that I know, it makes me worry about its accuracy in areas that I don't know. (See Gell-Mann Amnesia.)
Every part of this technology is astounding and you need a reasonable basis in physics to truly appreciate just how astounding it is. And the tolerances are so ridiculously precise, it boggles the mind.
Even before you get to the lithography machine you need silicon. For a long time we've known how this is done. You create what's called a boule, which is where you create a cylinder of almost pure silicon by seeding molten silicon with a crystal and slowly forming it. You then cut the boule into the silicon discs we often see. That machining and polishing itself has to be super-precise.
But I can remember when the tolerance for impurities was at 1 part per 300 million. I read recently that even 1 part per billion is now too impure. And that makes sense. The biggest chips are what? 80 billion transistors? I seem to remember NVidia makes chips in that range (or rather TSMC does for NVidia). At 1ppb that might make ruining your chip just too likely.
So my point is that there's a whole industry to make super-pure silicon which itself took amazing advancements and without that this machine would be a lot less useful.
Another part that amazes me is just how pervasive multiple layers on chips have become. I can remember when that was novel. The upper layers are made by cheaper machines with EUV reserved for a transistor "base layer" where all the interconnects really are.
It's amazing just how many problems had to be solved to make this posible.
For anyone interested in the topic I highly recommend this Veritasium video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0
The Veritasium video is good but their "newscast" style with constant back-and-forth cuts to talking heads can make the presentation a bit disjointed.
The more straightforward video of ASML EUV is from Branch Education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2482h_TNwg
Because that vid gives an overview of the whole machine, it gives context to what each scientist is talking about in the Veritasium interviews.
Thank you! The video you recommended definitely goes more in depth. I still like Veritasium's style more but it's just personal preference ofc
Yeah… when I’m eating breakfast, a lecture is not what I’m after. I watched that Veritasium video a while back and was glued to it. Any other presentation style and I probably would have completely skipped it (thinking I’ll watch it another time knowing I would never go back to it).
I recommend the Asianometry channel, he has a good series of videos about ASML, TSMC, chip fab supply chain, the Japan photo resist monopoly, etc
https://m.youtube.com/c/Asianometry/videos?ra=m
Asianometry is fantastic
Great video and I think the only way to truly grasp the complexity of EUV lithography as a layman.
They might be the most complex mass-produced commercial machines but the Large Hadron Collider has a plausible claim to the title of "world's most complex machine" https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/103591-la...
agree
I think something like this wins that category:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Interconnection
It's strange to count this as single machine. But if we go this way, the north Chinese interconnection and the continental Europe interconnection are bigger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_synchronous_grid).
I suppose it's partly a semantic question that hinges on what you count as a single "machine" and what's a system or a network.
The fact that there’s more than one copy of TWINSCAN EXE 5k seems important
I'm pretty sure that's the most bizarre light source on the planet: https://youtu.be/B2482h_TNwg?t=929
(The video describes the actual lithographic laser.)
And it's a source of serious hazardous waste products. It's a tin-ion laser, operating in an ultra-pure vacuum, on an unbelievably high-energy band (even laser "lines" have definable bandwidths). There's really not a lot of wiggle room in materials selection for the laser.
I wouldn't call it a laser. Lasers are just a forming and heating mechanism. The actual light source is tin plasma.
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.
The Omega Tau podcast visited ASML and did an episode a number of years ago: http://traffic.libsyn.com/omegataupodcast/omegatau-49-chipPr...
ASML are not the chokepoint for chips. Zeiss are. ASML can hire more engineers and build more machines. Zeiss cannot hire more mirror grinders. And noone wants to train as one.
What is preventing Zeiss from paying higher salaries to mirror grinders, so that young people consider that career over alternatives?
Uncertain long-term career prospects that depend on a single employer. If you pay enough to make long-term prospects irrelevant, you may end up attracting the wrong kind of people. People who can't be trained do the job well enough, or people who will quit after earning enough. And you may end up losing your existing employees. They may quit if they don't get paid as much as the new hires, or they may FIRE if they do.
How come FAANG companies don't have this same problem of people quitting after earning enough? They get paid much more, even without taking on the risk of being tied to a single employer.
The answer is that some people do quit and retire early, but even more are attracted to that career like moths to a flame, and work until they can't.
I do think they should raise pay for their existing employees at the same time. In fact, they should tie the compensation to progression in skill and experience, so that people who just came for the money and aren't cut out for the work or aren't in it for the long haul aren't attracted to the job. That's basically the traditional model anyway.
And yeah paying employees well might cost a bit of money (but really, not that much in the scope of things). If talent is their production bottleneck, it will be well worth the expense.
It's a more diverse industry with many companies and many types of jobs. If you don't like one job, you can quit and try another. Which people tend to do multiple times in their careers.
Software industry has always been plagued by attrition. Some companies pay well and mostly employ younger people. Older employees eventually filter out, either because they have already earned enough and prefer better work-life balance, or due to ageism. And then there are occasional downturns, where many people lose their jobs, can't find new ones, and end up leaving the industry permanently.
People generally prefer careers with multiple viable employers. Not just in the world, but also in the same metro area. That way you are less likely to get stuck in a job you don't like. But if you are an employer with unique requirements. Of skills that take years to learn and that people are not likely to acquire on their own. Then you may need to pay ridiculous money (more like AI than FAANG) to substantially widen your talent pipeline. And if you pay ridiculous money, you risk ridiculous consequences.
>And if you pay ridiculous money, you risk ridiculous consequences.
And if they do not, they risk ridiculous consequences. If Zeiss cannot afford to pay more, then it is underpricing its products.
It sounds like you're arguing that Zeiss needs to pay even more than FAANG to succeed in attracting people to work for them, which is a point that I agree with.
Surely you would increase the salary of the current employees if you're hiring new people with higher salaries.
Also, it sounds like the entire premise is "people don't want to work because they're not being paid enough" which is enough of a good reason by itself.
I believe there would be plenty of people in China up to the grinding job
Is it all still manual?
The final polishing for litography, yes
That's the first time I hear that claim. Genuinely curious if you got a source for that?
Yes, me
Cool story
Unless the pay is crap I'm sure lots of people would be interested.
On a tangent and out of curiosity: The image of "The electromagnetic spectrum" shows "London radio waves" on the far right (i.e. longest wavelengths).
Is this the correct term? Why do these long radio waves have the name "London"?
Unfortunately all that I get googling the term is a guide to local FM station frequencies.
I think it's an error. Should be long-wave (LW), as opposed to medium- and short-wave.
> To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks.
Is this just restating the size of the same shipment three times?
No, its emphasizing that the size of the shipment necessitates multiple high capacity logistic steps.
So 40 containers carried transported by 20 trucks and then by 3 cargo planes?
It is unavoidable that, at some point, China will have its own matching or better machine because they obviously how incredibly strategically important it is.
That question is discussed in the article.
“Retaining the best workers is especially crucial in an area like photolithography, where a huge amount of tacit knowledge is used to assemble its machines. An ASML engineer once told He Rongming, the founder of Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment, one of China’s top ASML competitors, that the company wouldn’t be able to replicate ASML’s products even if it had the blueprints. He suggested that ASML’s products reflected ‘decades, if not centuries’ of knowledge and experience. ASML’s Chinese competitors have systematically attempted to hire former ASML engineers, and there is at least one documented case of a former ASML employee unlawfully handing over proprietary information. But none of this appears to have narrowed the gap.”
Apparently China had a prototype EUV source working in 2025 (https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-china-built-its-manh... )
They are saying trying to exactly copy the machine by poaching employees or spying is impossible because it is too complex.
This does not mean that China cannot or will not have something similar at some point, probably sooner than later.
Non-zero chances - yes. Unavoidable - I wouldn't be so sure. I can't imagine how many top human-hours and cutting-edge inventions involved to construct this machine. And much of this simply cannot be stolen or bought, no matter how much money you have.
It has never happened in the history of the world that a company or country could maintain its technological advance indefinitely.
Either China will catch up on this or that particular technology will become obsolete. But it is certain that they won't stay behind forever (measured in a small number of decades at most).
Right but if you dont say how long it will take them, youre not really saying anything.
There is no doubt that less than 10 years will be needed for China to be able to do something equivalent to what the ASML machines can do now.
What is far less certain is what ASML will be able to do at that time, i.e. if they will be able to progress significantly over the state-of-the-art of today, or they will reach a plateau.
Besides China, there is a renewed effort in Japan to become competitive again, so ASML may face in the future both Chinese and Japanese competitors.
5 years China 5 years Japan 10 years Korea
> measured in a small number of decades at most
By "a small number of decades" do you mean from now, or starting from 15 years ago when the ASML Twinscan NXE:3100 made it debut?
This is kind of like saying you can prove everyone dies based on the evidence that everyone who is not currently alive has died.
You might place an upper limit using history but in this case I'd guess that limit would end up being much larger than the present semiconductor industry itself might last.
I'd say it is more likely than within 20 years the domestic Chinese semiconductor industry will be state-of-the-art across the full vertical and horizontal range.
There is a level of arrogance in the West that China does cheap but simple/low quality whereas this is only a stepping stone along the way. German car manufacturers went into China during the 90s with that mindset, and expecting it was forever, well they don't think that anymore...
I mean you’ve definitely just had technology disappear though, usually because of war. Damascus Steel was a lost military tech. We could certainly end up just accidentally (or worse, intentionally) bomb this stuff out of existence so nobody has it.
One can ballpark it, during EUV commercialization, ASML had 15k employees, Zeiss 3k, Cymer 1k. 20 years of non priority commercial development, lots of setbacks. Final integration ~5k suppliers. For reference commercial aviation Boeing/Airbus with as 100k employees, 50k suppliers. And we don't even know it's correct technical roadmap. Initially they thought synchrotron better than plasma/LPP but went with latter because synchrotron too expensive, now EUV machine prices ballooned to multiple synchrotron price. Don't be surprise if we find it dead end non competitive tech in 5-10 years if PRC or JP figures out SSMB/FEL etc, LPP may become economically uncompetitive and all ASML EUV becomes stranded assets. This real possibly because while ASML LPP works, it works at far higher cost than original projections, i.e. it's overbudget techstack with lethal scaling costs.
On paper EUV relatively modest undertaking vs commercial aviation, EUV deeper integration vs commercial aviation breadth, but in terms of scale of effort for nation state coordination, EUV probably all things considered, easier to replicate because it has no regulatory slowdown, it's purely host country physics problem. Having enough talent and throwing it at problem x espionage x poaching talent x time will likely solve precision physics problem sooner than later. Vs commercial aviation which has complicated geopolitical/regulatory hurdles and magnitude more suppliers and scale. TLDR EUV has smaller organizational surface area for determined state to pursue through concentrating $$$, talent and effort. You can buy a ex ASML to bootstrap EUV development, much harder to get globe to buy COMAC without decades of airworthiness. There's a reason western analysts predict PRC EUV in 2030s (meanwhile PRC already beat prototype estimate timeline), but probably not realistic for global COMAC in same timeframe, and PRC been hammering at commercial aviation seriously long before EUV.
That's the key - if it was done once, it can be done again, and likely it's going to be significantly cheaper/easier because it's known it can be done. We see this from olympic records (e.g., the 4 minute mile was a "barrier" until one day it was passed and suddenly a bunch of people passed it).
Of course, doing it "legally" is another question - someone in the US trying to replicate would likely run into patent and other issues.
But a top-secret Manhattan-style project done by the US or China? definitely doable, and if you add spy-shit in, perhaps even faster.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> and it (seems?) is simpler than some of the stuff in EUV machines.
It probably is. But it's probably in the same category of being one of the most difficult things to manufacture.
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.
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.
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
Hasn't happened yet.
That's the edge of what's possible, it's quite common even for researchers to have problems replicating results at the edge.
There's sometime implicit knowledge in a technique that either doesn't get written down, or someone is so good at something you don't think certain details will matter.
In my old lab (biochemistry) some people just have good hands and are really good at making something repeatable, others not so much.
The straregic importance is vastly over hyped. Maybe by people who want to sell chips. Actual physical feature size shrinkage rate has dramatically slowed from maybe a decade ago. making more efficient algorithms or architectures will beat out trying to fight physics.
"at some point" is doing a lot of work there. How long do you think?
30 years
Japan has restarted their efforts to have something unsure too.
> 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?
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.
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.
Oh, AMSL was designing components of the EUV system by 2005. So, more likely 25 years!
Let's not forget the really big gamble (inventing EUV) was made in the 1990s by US national labs: Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, and Lawrence Berkeley.
Every country tries to claim critical dependency for innovations. I guess you parochially mention that one because you remember that narrative (maybe because it makes you feel better).
I maliciously searched for examples of the French thinking they invented the transistor.
Turns out the French do have a claim of inventing it simultaneously (at the same time as Bell) and the French even commercialised their version since their tech had different parameters (Apparently it was two German inventors working for Westinghouse in France on a project for French telecoms as I recall). The history of invention/commercialisation is usually wierd.
>Apparently it was two German inventors working for Westinghouse in France on a project for French telecoms as I recall
So the Germans invented it! JK
I like how you put this. It always seems weird to me how some people get hung up on these claims when it's so obvious that history is full of basically simultaneous inventions.
Except ASML licensed the technology from the US Government, after the government labs built the first EUV fab in 2001. Not to take anything away from ASML...all the US companies that also licensed the tech failed to commercialize it, but the US Government blocked Canon and other Japanese companies from acquiring the technology. The entire reason ASML has the technology and nobody in Japan does is geopolitical.
Inventing EUV lasers.
Optics and photoresist materials too. The partnership developed the first EUV lithography in 2001: https://www.llnl.gov/article/27641/euvl-partnership-makes-it...
Do you have a link for the all-in-one project? I'd like to know more.
> Would we sooner have 10 additional ASMLs or waste a lot of resources?
It seems obvious that the answer would be both? All of these things are "bets", at almost every level.
What happens is someone comes along and notices the 9/10 failed attempts and decides that the right thing to do is only to make bets which are guaranteed to win. So they get smaller and smaller.
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...
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.
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.
Patents are supposed to be the antidote to industrial secrets. Of course, it doesn't really work out that way because in addition to patent writers hiding the ball or strategically layering patents and secrecy, things like tacit knowledge and organization play a huge role in exploring, building, and applying solutions. FOSS doesn't really help with the tacit stuff. It's partly why it's so difficult for projects to survive after the original authors move on. With software that's not necessarily immediately fatal as long as the software works well and is easy enough to tweak around the edges to keep it compiling and interfacing well, qualities which FOSS is meant to foster and preserve. But outside software, and especially in the industrial sphere, the loss of that tacit knowledge and organization is often immediately fatal. You can't just copy stuff, you have to rebuild all that tacit knowledge and process. Often times, like in software, the resulting product that nominally achieves the same results is built around an entirely different technical approach.
.. all the more reason to support approaches which reduce dependency on an elite group of knowledge-holders.
A wider scope of attention yes. I'm not convinced there would be nearly as many multi-billion dollar research projects.
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 ..
And if you had done that 10 years ago we wouldn’t hve EUV at all. You’re proposing ending future development to make today’s products cheaper.
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.
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.
> If everyone could make these machines, there'd be more of these machines.
My post is in violent agreement with this, for this generation of machines.
ASML spends ~$5B annually on R&D with the expectation that they will be able to make ~30% net profit in the future. If you remove patent protection, there will be more competition and obviously profit margins will fall.
I want to rephrase that for emphasis. The point of aa-jv's post was that we would get cheaper chips by invalidating IP. Cheaper chips means lower margins (because you have not lowered input prices). Lower margins was the explicit goal, so to the extent that the changes in IP law work, you will get lower margins for companies like ASML.
At that point, you have a field of companies looking at (say) 10% net returns, still needing to invest billions of new capital into R&D every year. Worse: no patents means that Company A could spend $5B on R&D and Company B could spend $0, and both of them could reap the benefits of that $5B by Company A. So it's not even necessarily clear that the industry would see much net innovation.
Are we even certain there are companies who would enter this capital-intensive business assuming IP was free? Compulsory licensing is a thing, but I am not aware of that even being something that has been requested.
I mean, it’s been tried; a reading of relevant historical texts would give you lots of ammunition to support either argument.
I find this paragraph to be odd: "Wavelengths as low as 13.5 nanometers can achieve more precise patterns in a single exposure. In fact, extreme ultraviolet lithography can combine three or four photolithography patterning cycles into a single one on a seven-nanometer node. Without EUV, producing five-nanometer nodes might require as many as one hundred different steps."
But a five-nanometer node has a gate pitch of 45nm and a metal pitch of 20nm! Using different forms of the word "nanometer" in the same paragraph is very confusing...
I agree, for anyone who's not familiar with it, one is a marketing term while the other is the actual measurement.
I thought the power grid is the most complex machine. The power grid is a gigantic machine spanning a country or significant parts of a country. It includes all the power production plants, millions of miles of transmission and distribution lines, substations for transmission and distribution, and billions of devices consuming power for residential and industrial use. The grid ensures these billions of devices are operating at 60 Hz frequency—all the time. The grid's primary function is to maintain this frequency, no matter what.
There's some really good analysis (both business and tech) from the Asianometry youtube channel (ignore the name of the channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmgkV83OhHA&list=PLKtxx9TnH7...
one thing not mentioned is how China is using the older tech DUV's to print advanced chips
since replicating EUVs is close to impossible.
If ASML could do it, China will also do it. It's just a matter of development time and resources, both of which are plentiful in China.
Didn’t Japan just recently restarted their own project in this area?
https://www.rapidus.inc/en/news_topics/information/rapidus-b...
https://www.semimedia.cc/18196.html
If China and Japan are currently working on it, certainly South Korea is not far behind.
They did. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/12/18/tech/china-...
My understanding is step size has divergred from physical feature size for the past decade or so eg. 3 nm step (marketing) may actually be 42 nm physical. so in other words progress has slowed (diminishing returns to inverse scaling)
> 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 me two very important things and little else by comparison: that the machines are ultimately fragile and nowhere near "optimised", since the complexity is by own admission substantial to put it mildly; the machine is not a commodity, exactly, one of the million pieces breaking subtly likely renders it inoperable; its cost is proportional to its complexity (read: astronomic); by mere fact it's a focal point of geopolitics only supports the rest of the argument it's a machine of current stone age much like siege engines were at some point the closely guarded secret win-or-lose multiplers of feudal culture.
I mean it's certainly interesting to read about the complexity, but reducing the complexity and commoditising the whole thing is what's really going to be impressive I think :-)
I am probably speaking out against the nerd in us, and none of what I said should detract from enjoying the article or the subject, it's just that I think complexity here is the giveaway of us not having conquered UVL exactly, not quite yet :-) Or maybe we lack the right materials which would allow us to reduce the machine or make it less complex or prone to calibration related errors.
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.
> reducing the complexity and commoditising the whole thing is what's really going to be impressive I think
What do you think "cutting edge" is, or Moore's law has been?
At one point you could have written a similar article about, say, 165nm, which is now going to the scrapyard. In the past these things have always gradually got more available and easier, with higher yields - but a new, better one appears.
But at some point we're going to reach an equilibrium with physics itself. Where, even with all the complexity we can muster, it's not possible to make it easier or get smaller.
Indeed, all this reminds me of the marvel that is mechanical timekeeping - incredibly complex engineering that would ultimately be surpassed by dirt cheap electronics.
What is the corresponding revolution in chip production? I imagine something like FPGAs for litography - a wafer that can somehow work on another wafer in a sandwich-like configuration. Such a process could potentially improve on each iteration and thus get very good, very fast.
"Seeing ASML’s machinery exhibited at IMEC was what led TSMC to partner with ASML in EUV development. "
This industry sure likes it's acronyms.
Everything here except EUV are company names.
WDYM? IDK, LGTM.
If there's really such a bottleneck around ASML, why not design some extra chips for legacy processes that presumably already have well known design workflows?
I mean we're not talking AMD FX and Core 2 Duo here, it's Raptor Lake and Zen 3, it's perfectly viable and still being sold in droves right now.
That’s what the likes of AMD with their chiplet design have been doing.
There’s also the issue of older process nodes not being profitable enough anymore, which explaines why at the height of the chip supply crunch older ARM chips were in short supply but there was ample stock of the 20nm feature-sized RP2040.
This is gonna sound super dumb, but I'm not sure how they aren't being profitable if there are shortages, just price things beyond break even level? The average person can't even tell the difference between a Core 5 and a Core 5 Ultra, you can practically sell them at the same price and I'm not even sure they'd notice when actually using them. The performance jump is relatively minor and the bottlenecks are elsewhere.
It mostly comes down to the consumer market not being significant enough by itself. A consumer may not notice a 10% increase in performance per watt or dollar. A large office building probably will, and a datacenter definitely will.
I don't think I'm being entirely hyperbolic when I say the consumer market only exists to put devices that can connect to and feed the datacenter loads into the general populations hands.
Part of those prices aren't something the manufacturer can adjust. Whether you're building 60nm or 20nm chips, you need pretty much the same silicon wafers, the same ultra pure water, the same chemicals and the same personnel. And as a bonus, you're not gonna be getting as many of the same chips on that wafer.
And sure, a chip layout can be shrunk; but that requires a whole new recertification cycle.
Isn't exactly this what China is doing? Apart from poaching ex ASML employees? Now reaching 7nm, and just throwing up more energy to catch up in FLOPS like Jensen said?
Because very large share of market now are datacenters. Difference from desktop is dramatic - for desktop really acceptable very simple chips with bad energy efficiency, but DCs already deal with extremely high power consumption, as they typically "compress" so much consumption in one rack, that constantly working near to physical constraints.
You can't make desktop computer 4 times larger but there's very little preventing you form putting 4 racks where you had 1 before. If the floor space is the expensive part of data center then probably some incentives are misaligned.
For about price of land and connectivity - in large city land price begin on few millions dollars per square kilometer, and usage of cable channels could cost from 50$ per meter (easy could be 200$/m).
Plus, space arrange could last years.
Heat dissipation in range of megawatts could be just prohibited by local regulations.
So, space in large cities is very serious problem, and for business it is usually easier to "compress" as much computing power as possible in one rack.
> in large city land price begin on few millions dollars per square kilometer,
There's little need to put large datacenters in downtown Chicago and Manhattan.
Bigger chips = more distance to cover for your electrons = more power required = more generated heat = slower throughput for your data.
Surely you don't believe that the entire chip industry had not thought of "wait what if we just make the chips bigger".
AMD hiding Threadripper behind their back: Uh yeah what a terrible idea, we definitely didn't actually do that. Making a CPU that's twice the size, how ridiculous would that be right?!
You found an exception to my two-line generalization. Congrats!
The main reason to reduce feature size since quite some time has been to make more money per wafer, and faster.
Same reason that so much work was put into increasing wafer diameter over the decades.
More chips per wafer means a lot.
Much more than for performance sake.
You cannot place dc anywhere, in large cities space is extremely constrained, and land is extremely expensive.
Also big problem - connectivity - you cannot place DC where it cannot be connected to power grid and to very powerful network.
So yes, DC floor space is severely limited.
And the third issue - last decades, rack servers dissipate extremely large amounts of heat, I hear numbers up to tens Kilowatts per rack, which is just hard to dissipate with air cooling (as example, all IBM Power servers have option of liquid cooling, but this is totally different price range).
That's the AI hype narrative, but aren't server CPUs only like 25% of the total market? That's tiny compared to consumer volume, though revenue is likely on par given the higher cost per unit.
> aren't server CPUs only like 25% of the total market?
Yes and no. If just formally calculate, yes, servers are small market volumes. But, they are much less constrained financially, than private person, so from same fab one could earn much more money if sell to server market, than if sell to consumer market.
I don't think that's correct, server chips aren't really "more expensive" than consumer chips when you correctly account for performance. Older-gen server chips have comparable performance to new top-of-the-line consumer chips and sell for a similar price. Newer-gen server chips in turn are priced at a premium over the current value of the older-gen, to account for their higher performance. The lower financial constraints don't enter into it all that much.
For many years until about a decade ago (more precisely until the launch of the Intel Skylake Server processors) the server CPUs had a performance per dollar comparable to desktop CPUs so the expensive server CPUs were expensive because of their higher performance.
But since then the prices of server CPUs have ballooned and now their performance per dollar is many times worse than for desktop CPUs. Server CPUs have very good performance per watt, but the same performance per watt is achieved with desktop CPUs by underclocking them.
The only advantage of server CPUs is that they aggregate in a single socket the equivalent of many desktop CPUs, including not only the aggregate number of cores, but also the aggregate number of memory channels and the aggregate number of PCIe lanes. Thus a server computer becomes equivalent with a cluster of desktop computers that would be interconnected by network interfaces much faster than the typically available Ethernet links.
While for embarrassingly parallel tasks a server computer will cost many times more than a cluster of desktop computers with the same performance, it will have a much less disadvantage or it might even have a better performance/cost ratio for tasks with a lot of interprocess/interthread communication, where the tight coupling between the many cores hosted by the same socket ensures a lower latency and a higher throughput for such communication.
The owners of datacenters are willing to pay the much higher prices of modern server CPUs because the consolidation into a single server of multiple old servers brings economies in other components, due to less coolers, less power supplies, less racks, simpler maintenance and administration, etc.
While the prices of server CPUs at retail are huge, the biggest costumers, like cloud owners, can get very large discounts, so for them the difference in comparison with desktop CPUs is not as great as for SMEs and individuals. The large discounts that Intel was forced to accept during the last few years, to avoid losing too much of the market to AMD, were the cause why Intel's server CPU division has lost many billions of $.
Intel is using ASML machines now right ? How far behind is their in house tech really and do they still research it?
Wow. I see the head of Charlie Chaplin inside the center machine unit. Do you see it?
Isn't the ISS supposed to be the most complicated machine ever built by humans?
I usually hear it as "one of the most expensive single projects" rather than the most complex. I'd bet there any many more complex, the LHC comes to mind.
In terms of precission engineering LHC is for sure more complex. But then again ISS is made out of many life-critical systems. In safety critical systems a the actual hardware may look simpler in some ways than stuff you see on the bleeding edge for that category of product, but then the complexity is in turning it into something that can be safety certifiable. Just different math entirely.
ie there's lots of fun applications for radar, some of them have very complex math involved in manufacturing processes. Then you got automotive radar, you mainly need to get the position and velocity of some objects, the math is simpler. But you have to certify that stuff for ASIL-D, no one makes you ASIL-D radars, so you combine multiple radars. 3'Bs make a D as the saying goes.. Then you gotta worry about BOM costs because you want to ship 10 million cars..
ISS is complex because of the huge amount parts to assemble it. When it comes to precise technical cutting edge tech ASML is easily on top.
Big idea → good for thoughtful comment
and yet not even close to the complexity of the human brain
It looks complicated but I suspect that 90% of what I see in that picture is just a giant refrigerator.
Not even close.
Gemini tells me: calling an ASML machine a "giant refrigerator" is actually a pretty sophisticated observation. While it doesn't store milk, a massive portion of that plumbing is dedicated to thermal management and vacuum systems. (...)
"and vacuum systems" is the key here. The refrigeration is a well-solved issue.
There's impeller-type vacuum engines, which is what most people think about.
Then there's multiple-stage fans, where the purpose is to overcome random atomic vectors: an atom flying the wrong direction is more likely than not to hit a fan blade and bounce vaguely toward the output direction. Extra stages increase the odds of outward vectors, instead of rebounding off walls in some unhelpful direction. These are needed when the pressure is already so low that gas atoms don't hit each other, so they act like particles instead of gases.
There's also molecular getter pumps, that are reactive coatings inside the vacuum. Their purpose is to permanently adhere any stray molecules that tend to cling to surfaces (like H2O), so they won't eventually decouple and ruin the vacuum.
Each is used to reach increasing levels of "vacuum", which is more like "single-molecule denial gates" at that point.