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Would it be financially viable to make lithography machines that use 20 year old technology? How long would you expect that market to exist? What would be the c

Would it be financially viable to make lithography machines that use 20 year old technology? How long would you expect that market to exist? What would be the capital costs of making these machines, apart from talent acquisition?

skrebbel 6y ago
The company I contracted for marketed them for LED production (I don't know the details, but making tiny gaps on the right places in the surface could somehow make the LEDs more efficient) and for the upper layers of chips, where way less precision is needed. We got to a .8 micrometer error margin, which is "an enormous valley" by ASML standards but still fine for the top ~5 layers of normal semicon designs, where there's typically way fewer lanes, placed more widely apart. Again, I don't know much about chip design so I probably got all the details wrong. Basically, yes there's a market. It's not at all as big as ASML's but it doesn't need to be. There's also a market of refurbishing old ASML/Canon/Nikon machines and repurposing for different parts of the production process (either chips or other semicon stuff like LEDs), which is what a new litho startup would compete with I think. Note that all my knowledge about this is 5 years outdated, I now run a chat api startup :-)
- blueblisters 6y ago
  Ah interesting. Thanks for the context! To me, the semiconductor fabrication world is like an opaque industry where you need a significant amount of capital to do anything useful. Very happy to learn that startups are getting a chance too. Super curious to know if the company made it.
  - skrebbel 6y ago
    As far as I know they didn't. The r&d was in NL but the sales and marketing, as well as the funding, was in China. Last I heard our prototype machine got shipped to China, and either our work sucked way more than I think it did, or the sales people botched it (or I'm wrong and there's simply no market) but last I heard its still in boxes in a storage facility somewhere in Shanghai. I know it's easy to say "we did great but the HQ fucked it up" so I don't want to make that claim. I honestly don't know where it went wrong (and I was way less interested in sales and marketing and entrepreneurship then, so I didn't ask). I learned everything I know about lean and agile and just shipping from our R&D lead though. He was ex-ASML and they definitely know how to ship.

skrebbel 6y ago

The company I contracted for marketed them for LED production (I don't know the details, but making tiny gaps on the right places in the surface could somehow make the LEDs more efficient) and for the upper layers of chips, where way less precision is needed. We got to a .8 micrometer error margin, which is "an enormous valley" by ASML standards but still fine for the top ~5 layers of normal semicon designs, where there's typically way fewer lanes, placed more widely apart. Again, I don't know much about chip design so I probably got all the details wrong. Basically, yes there's a market. It's not at all as big as ASML's but it doesn't need to be. There's also a market of refurbishing old ASML/Canon/Nikon machines and repurposing for different parts of the production process (either chips or other semicon stuff like LEDs), which is what a new litho startup would compete with I think. Note that all my knowledge about this is 5 years outdated, I now run a chat api startup :-)

blueblisters 6y ago
Ah interesting. Thanks for the context! To me, the semiconductor fabrication world is like an opaque industry where you need a significant amount of capital to do anything useful. Very happy to learn that startups are getting a chance too. Super curious to know if the company made it.
- skrebbel 6y ago
  As far as I know they didn't. The r&d was in NL but the sales and marketing, as well as the funding, was in China. Last I heard our prototype machine got shipped to China, and either our work sucked way more than I think it did, or the sales people botched it (or I'm wrong and there's simply no market) but last I heard its still in boxes in a storage facility somewhere in Shanghai. I know it's easy to say "we did great but the HQ fucked it up" so I don't want to make that claim. I honestly don't know where it went wrong (and I was way less interested in sales and marketing and entrepreneurship then, so I didn't ask). I learned everything I know about lean and agile and just shipping from our R&D lead though. He was ex-ASML and they definitely know how to ship.