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EU has the tech. ASML is #2 company in EURO STOXX 50 index with 5.69% weight. ASML is the world's largest photolithography systems manufacturer and the only on

EU has the tech. ASML is #2 company in EURO STOXX 50 index with 5.69% weight. ASML is the world's largest photolithography systems manufacturer and the only one producing extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. These EUV scanners are expensive as hell. Last years model costs $120 million per piece and you need 10-15 of them for TSMC gigafactory. TWINSCAN NXE:3400C (7 and 5 nm nodes, >170 wafers per hour) is probably the most expensive machine in the world.

iagovar 6y ago
The EU has the tech, but that's not enough. I won't say the whole budget will be wasted away, but I hold no hope of something useful coming out of it. The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a ton of little shops, but all of them are far away from the major players. And they are moderately confortable in their niches. This is a very high risk endeavour, even with EU money. And as far as I know, none of them manufacture for other end-user players, so even if there was a new fabless company with a cool project, it's likely that wouldn't be made in the EU bu by Samsumg or TSMC.
- rualca 6y ago
  > The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a ton of little shops, but all of them are far away from the major players. They don't need to become major players for this program to be a major success. Both India's and China's push for a native self-sufficient industrial capabilities have been a huge success in spite of not delivering a cutting edge processor. Moreover, AMD showed that right now the key factor to develop a product line that dominates all competitors in all categories, from performance to power efficiency and also price, is access to a capable manufacturing hub.
  - DSingularity 6y ago
    What? You are basically discount AMD design. The manufacturing and process tech are critical but not enough alone. You need good design.
    - samfisher83 6y ago
      When you can use the twice the number of transistors and they use 1/3 less power that is a pretty big advantage to work with. You might have the best car design in world, but if all could use was wood vs someone else who had a crappy design, but had aluminum the crappy designed car might work better. Not saying this is the case with AMD vs Intel, but right now Intel's manufacturing is hurting them.
  - rmrfstar 6y ago
    "Sovereignty" is an important concept that dropped out of American discourse in the 1990s. No self-respecting country relies on foreign cryptography to protect its diplomatic communications. Similarly, no self-respecting country in 2030 will rely entirely on foreign integrated circuits. FPGAs will play an important role for small countries, but large groups like EU can afford to go big.
    - lumost 6y ago
      Sovereignty matters when you can’t trust there won’t be supply disruptions due to war, piracy, or trade intervention. Post ww2 the US had no reason to be concerned with any of the above in the western world, following the collapse of the USSR this mentality was extended globally with the belief that “we’d reached the end of history”. As of 2020 I don’t think any major power considers the risk of trade interventions or war to be negligible. The us navy may no longer be capable of ensuring freedom of the seas unilaterally.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - rmrfstar 6y ago
        An alternative explanation is that US policy makers like Larry Summers and Bob Rubin are just incompetent, delusional, and greedy.
    - sneak 6y ago
      > No self-respecting country relies on foreign cryptography to protect its diplomatic communications. I am fairly certain most of the western world relies on a Belgian cipher called Rijndael to encrypt all/the majority of its diplomatic communications. I'm not really sure what you mean by this comment.
      - rmrfstar 6y ago
        There is a lot more to a communication system than the primitives it uses. Even holding primitives constant, there is a lot of room for variation (and bugs and side channels). Recall that one of the early identifiers of equation group was subtracting 0x61C88647 rather than adding 0x9E3779B9 during RC6 key setup [1 p. 28]. So I guess what I'm saying is nations don't just download AES bitstreams off the internet. [1] https://media.kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/43/2018/03/08064459/Equation_group_questions_and_answers.pdf https://media.kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/sit...
  - bogomipz 6y ago
    >"Both India's and China's push for a native self-sufficient industrial capabilities have been a huge success in spite of not delivering a cutting edge processor." Could you elaborate on these huge successes in these two countries? I do remember hearing that India had produced a SPARC-based chip.
- stevespang 6y ago
  Agreed. EU has no track record of producing leading edge nm chips, any EU designs will more likely be fabbed at TSMC or maybe Samsung.
- misja111 6y ago
  > .. I won't say the whole budget will be wasted away, but I hold no hope of something useful coming out of it. The ECB has been buying trillions of euro's worth of dubious government bonds and bank debts for the last couple of years. Also every year the EU pays hundreds of billions worth of subsidies to European farmers so that they are able to sell their goods below global market prices. I would say that this 145 billion is as good an investment if not better than what EU money has been spent on so far.
  - vladimirralev 6y ago
    Central banks and governments pretty much already committed to drive a planned economy. EU subsidises farmers (among others) to sell goods at cheap prices, which causes consumer prices to drop and in the end the ECB says inflation is too low, so let's print money to buy more gov bonds. Governments then use the money to subsidise something else distorting the markets and it loops back to disinflation and the central bank printing even more money. It's a joke. Might as well just admit, semiconductors or not, the future of the economy is with the politically preselected winners who get the subsidies and the loans. Risk premiums, collateral, macroprudential regulation, insurance and so on is for the peasants.
skrebbel 6y ago
ASML is impressive for sure, but having the litho doesn't mean you can make good chips. As a mediocre analogy, you don't expect to be able to write good novels because you got your hands on a printer. I think much of the relevant general-purpose chip design knowledge we had (ARM) left the EU this morning. I don't yet see any other chip company (eg NXP etc) suddenly be the next Intel or AMD yet (let alone the next Apple).
- ginko 6y ago
  >I think much of the relevant chip design knowledge we had (ARM) left the EU this morning. The larger ARM Cortex cores are still designed to a large degree in Southern France.
  - iagovar 6y ago
    Yeah but that's ARM IP though. There's a window of opportunity with RISC V, but something tells me that the fact it's open source rubs against some people.
    - ginko 6y ago
      >Yeah but that's ARM IP though. How does this matter? Do you think ARM won't license their IP to European chip makers?
      - rusk 6y ago
        Are ARM still Japanese? I think there’s a pretty solid trade agreement between the EU and Japan ...
        alexhutcheson 6y ago
        https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for-40-billion-creating-worlds-premier-computing-company-for-the-age-of-ai/ https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for...
kasperni 6y ago
The previous top model NXE:3400B, "weighs 180 tons and needs 20 trucks or three fully loaded Boeing 747s for shipment. The price tag is $120 million." [1] [1] https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14039015/how-does-the-laser-technology-in-euv-lithography-work#:~:text=The%20current%20top%20model%2C%20the,resolution%20down%20to%2013%20nm https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14039015/how-d....
- tape_measure 6y ago
  That's ~$.66/g. A car at that price would be around $1M.
- Nokinside 6y ago
  Most of that is packaging, seriously. The purity requirements and vibrational limits for those parts are very high. ASML has plans to get into sub 1nm level. 2nm and 1.5 nm is already in the pipeline. The technology high-NA EUV (high Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet) becomes just insane. Mirror manufacturing process requires atomic scale corrections and the whole metrology is moved into vacuum. The limit for mass production is measuring and calibration. The measurement accuracy is comparable or exeeding Large Hadron Collideror gravitational-wave astronomy. The speed (wafers per hour) must eventually slow down, requiring more machines and making the process more expensive. Then Moore's law finally dies due to the cost.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    > The measurement accuracy is comparable or exeeding [..] gravitational-wave astronomy A nitpick: You are greatly underestimating the precision in gravitational-wave astronomy. ASML's atomic scale corrections are approximately one billion times larger than the fraction-of-a-proton's width displacements measured by LIGO. From https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts: > At its most sensitive state, LIGO will be able to detect a change in distance between its mirrors 1/10,000th the width of a proton! This is equivalent to measuring the distance to the nearest star (some 4.2 light years away) to an accuracy smaller than the width of a human hair.
FartyMcFarter 6y ago
Look at it and ponder how amazing it is that we've built this with our monkey brains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBdMRUG69uc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBdMRUG69uc So many disciplines of engineering going into this machine!
baybal2 6y ago
> ASML is #2 company in EURO STOXX 50 index with 5.69% weight. And not a small part to gigantic speculative expectations around tech sector in general, which seem to have crossed the Atlantic this year. So much speculative interest has never been a good thing as we know.
baybal2 6y ago
> TWINSCAN NXE:3400C is probably the most expensive machine in the world. Unfortunately no. A number of pieces of military hardware produced in bigger numbers will leave even that pricetag in the dust.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
  Like what?
  - baybal2 6y ago
    Fighter jets, bombers, few missile systems, air defence systems, subs, and surface military ships... the list would be long.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    B2 spirit costs more than its weight in gold, clocking in at close to a billion
    - paulnechifor 6y ago
      3.17 billion in 2019 dollars, or 1.11 if you exclude the sunk costs.
    - JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
      That is absolutely incredible.
  - shi314 6y ago
    There are plenty aircraft models like B-2 Spirit, F-22 Raptor etc. that cost above $200 million.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - joejerryronnie 6y ago
    Do aircraft carriers count in this context? They’re reasonably expensive to produce.
soygul 6y ago
Bagger 293 probably is the most expensive machine. It costs $100M to build one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_293 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_293
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  Fascinating. Had to look it up — the photos of it are mind boggling. I have to say though, from Wikipedia, sounds like there are only a few of them? Sort of one-offs, each of them (so to speak). I kind of think that might disqualify them. Like calling the ISS the most expensive machine?
- tda 6y ago
  Floating versions of those machines (dredging vessels) are in the 300M range. And the offshore installation vessel Pioneering Spirit came in at 2.6B: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneering_Spirit_(ship) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneering_Spirit_(ship)
- Defenestresque 6y ago
  The leaders of the free world sat around a secret table... https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow (I know this comment is not exactly in the mood of HN, but this is the one thing I never fail to think of when someone mentions the Bagger family of murderous machines!)
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
If the EU treats this as a strategic capability and not commercial, the spending is much less of a consideration. The advantage that the EU has is in fact ASML. No company can make the 5nm litho systems today, and catching up with the decades of R&D they've invested is not feasible. They are the greatest achievement of science and technology on the planet. [0] The strategy that can work is for the EU to partner with TSMC to build a foundry in the EU that produces at the node they want to intercept (2 nm?). Then, make a business arrangement that puts European scientists and engineers into high-value roles. That would enable the EU to develop the technical skills and keep China from locking it up. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25361028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25361028
- Nokinside 6y ago
  Pretty much. All big players (US, EU, China) must maintain domestic strategically important industries (aerospace, energy, semiconductors, telecom, drugs/biotech ...) even with government subsidies. The goal of strategic investment is to stay as one of the major players in the industry. Being the leader is not necessary, but letting the deep core and knowledge in manufacturing to erode is strategic weakness.
  - f6v 6y ago
    Exactly the opposite happened in Russia and other ex-soviet countries. The factories were sold and dismantled under the pretense of “transitioning to market economy”.
    - tasubotadas 6y ago
      They were non-competitive businesses producing outdated junk and in majority of cases there was no other way to survive apart of being sold for scrap. Some manufacturers that produced basic sellable goods survived (steel foundries, fertilizer makers)
      - lumost 6y ago
        Price signals following the soviet collapse were non functioning ( see the current oligarchs ). It’s hard to know how many of these factories could have adapted over a slightly longer time frame or with some slight investment restructuring. When the price of a corporation falls below their paper assets it tends to attract A certain kind of investor disinterested in long term value. I’d venture a good number of soviet parts suppliers saw their revenues dry up when their clients were dismantled, it wouldn’t have taken more than a few such links in the supply chain being dismantled to break the entire supply chain given the level of centralization.
lumost 6y ago
I’ve heard this often repeated claim about ASML owning the core tech behind TSMC’s 5nm process. However if it was just a question of buying N 200 million dollar machines to launch a 5nm foundry wouldn’t we see dozens of 5nm competitors? Why hasn’t intel , apple, Samsung, or AMD shelled out for 10? Given the size of this commitment it seems clear that there is a lot more to 5nm than the lithography machine.
- dmix 6y ago
  It also adds the question what ASML has to gain from handing over their technical advantage to some local gov effort. I mean they can get paid but there’s a ton of other companies not starting from scratch they can also make billions off of so I don’t see why some geographic thing is some huge advantage for EU. They already operate in a highly lucrative global market with companies who don’t need to figure anything out. If anything this should be expansion capital or efforts to build more factories locally. Not trying to do it themselves. But hey what do I know. I don’t have multiple countries with lagging tech interests in mind with lots of money to burn.
- ksec 6y ago
  >it seems clear that there is a lot more to 5nm Yes there is whole part of equation that has nothing to do with ASML. But the point, to over simplify things a lot was that without ASML there are currently zero chance you could get leading edge node working. But even with it you have barely started. Look at Intel, Samsung and Global Foundry.
judge2020 6y ago
> for TSMC gigafactory I thought 'gigafactory' was coined by Tesla/Elon?
- Nokinside 6y ago
  Should have said Gigafab GIGAFAB® is TSMC's trade mark.
- ksec 6y ago
  Yes. The correct term for TSMC should be GigaFab, which was used long before Elon coined GigaFactory. It was named as such because of the scale and capacity of those Fab as compared to other pure play competitor. It was also one reason how TSMC manage to win by Economy of Scale.
antisoeu 6y ago
Does ASML belong to "the EU", though, or is it a private company?

iagovar 6y ago

The EU has the tech, but that's not enough. I won't say the whole budget will be wasted away, but I hold no hope of something useful coming out of it. The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a ton of little shops, but all of them are far away from the major players. And they are moderately confortable in their niches. This is a very high risk endeavour, even with EU money. And as far as I know, none of them manufacture for other end-user players, so even if there was a new fabless company with a cool project, it's likely that wouldn't be made in the EU bu by Samsumg or TSMC.

rualca 6y ago
> The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a ton of little shops, but all of them are far away from the major players. They don't need to become major players for this program to be a major success. Both India's and China's push for a native self-sufficient industrial capabilities have been a huge success in spite of not delivering a cutting edge processor. Moreover, AMD showed that right now the key factor to develop a product line that dominates all competitors in all categories, from performance to power efficiency and also price, is access to a capable manufacturing hub.
- DSingularity 6y ago
  What? You are basically discount AMD design. The manufacturing and process tech are critical but not enough alone. You need good design.
  - samfisher83 6y ago
    When you can use the twice the number of transistors and they use 1/3 less power that is a pretty big advantage to work with. You might have the best car design in world, but if all could use was wood vs someone else who had a crappy design, but had aluminum the crappy designed car might work better. Not saying this is the case with AMD vs Intel, but right now Intel's manufacturing is hurting them.
- rmrfstar 6y ago
  "Sovereignty" is an important concept that dropped out of American discourse in the 1990s. No self-respecting country relies on foreign cryptography to protect its diplomatic communications. Similarly, no self-respecting country in 2030 will rely entirely on foreign integrated circuits. FPGAs will play an important role for small countries, but large groups like EU can afford to go big.
  - lumost 6y ago
    Sovereignty matters when you can’t trust there won’t be supply disruptions due to war, piracy, or trade intervention. Post ww2 the US had no reason to be concerned with any of the above in the western world, following the collapse of the USSR this mentality was extended globally with the belief that “we’d reached the end of history”. As of 2020 I don’t think any major power considers the risk of trade interventions or war to be negligible. The us navy may no longer be capable of ensuring freedom of the seas unilaterally.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - rmrfstar 6y ago
      An alternative explanation is that US policy makers like Larry Summers and Bob Rubin are just incompetent, delusional, and greedy.
  - sneak 6y ago
    > No self-respecting country relies on foreign cryptography to protect its diplomatic communications. I am fairly certain most of the western world relies on a Belgian cipher called Rijndael to encrypt all/the majority of its diplomatic communications. I'm not really sure what you mean by this comment.
    - rmrfstar 6y ago
      There is a lot more to a communication system than the primitives it uses. Even holding primitives constant, there is a lot of room for variation (and bugs and side channels). Recall that one of the early identifiers of equation group was subtracting 0x61C88647 rather than adding 0x9E3779B9 during RC6 key setup [1 p. 28]. So I guess what I'm saying is nations don't just download AES bitstreams off the internet. [1] https://media.kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/43/2018/03/08064459/Equation_group_questions_and_answers.pdf https://media.kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/sit...
- bogomipz 6y ago
  >"Both India's and China's push for a native self-sufficient industrial capabilities have been a huge success in spite of not delivering a cutting edge processor." Could you elaborate on these huge successes in these two countries? I do remember hearing that India had produced a SPARC-based chip.
stevespang 6y ago
Agreed. EU has no track record of producing leading edge nm chips, any EU designs will more likely be fabbed at TSMC or maybe Samsung.
misja111 6y ago
> .. I won't say the whole budget will be wasted away, but I hold no hope of something useful coming out of it. The ECB has been buying trillions of euro's worth of dubious government bonds and bank debts for the last couple of years. Also every year the EU pays hundreds of billions worth of subsidies to European farmers so that they are able to sell their goods below global market prices. I would say that this 145 billion is as good an investment if not better than what EU money has been spent on so far.
- vladimirralev 6y ago
  Central banks and governments pretty much already committed to drive a planned economy. EU subsidises farmers (among others) to sell goods at cheap prices, which causes consumer prices to drop and in the end the ECB says inflation is too low, so let's print money to buy more gov bonds. Governments then use the money to subsidise something else distorting the markets and it loops back to disinflation and the central bank printing even more money. It's a joke. Might as well just admit, semiconductors or not, the future of the economy is with the politically preselected winners who get the subsidies and the loans. Risk premiums, collateral, macroprudential regulation, insurance and so on is for the peasants.

skrebbel 6y ago

ASML is impressive for sure, but having the litho doesn't mean you can make good chips. As a mediocre analogy, you don't expect to be able to write good novels because you got your hands on a printer. I think much of the relevant general-purpose chip design knowledge we had (ARM) left the EU this morning. I don't yet see any other chip company (eg NXP etc) suddenly be the next Intel or AMD yet (let alone the next Apple).

ginko 6y ago
>I think much of the relevant chip design knowledge we had (ARM) left the EU this morning. The larger ARM Cortex cores are still designed to a large degree in Southern France.
- iagovar 6y ago
  Yeah but that's ARM IP though. There's a window of opportunity with RISC V, but something tells me that the fact it's open source rubs against some people.
  - ginko 6y ago
    >Yeah but that's ARM IP though. How does this matter? Do you think ARM won't license their IP to European chip makers?
    - rusk 6y ago
      Are ARM still Japanese? I think there’s a pretty solid trade agreement between the EU and Japan ...
      - alexhutcheson 6y ago
        https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for-40-billion-creating-worlds-premier-computing-company-for-the-age-of-ai/ https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for...

kasperni 6y ago

The previous top model NXE:3400B, "weighs 180 tons and needs 20 trucks or three fully loaded Boeing 747s for shipment. The price tag is $120 million." [1] [1] https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14039015/how-does-the-laser-technology-in-euv-lithography-work#:~:text=The%20current%20top%20model%2C%20the,resolution%20down%20to%2013%20nm https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14039015/how-d....

tape_measure 6y ago
That's ~$.66/g. A car at that price would be around $1M.
Nokinside 6y ago
Most of that is packaging, seriously. The purity requirements and vibrational limits for those parts are very high. ASML has plans to get into sub 1nm level. 2nm and 1.5 nm is already in the pipeline. The technology high-NA EUV (high Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet) becomes just insane. Mirror manufacturing process requires atomic scale corrections and the whole metrology is moved into vacuum. The limit for mass production is measuring and calibration. The measurement accuracy is comparable or exeeding Large Hadron Collideror gravitational-wave astronomy. The speed (wafers per hour) must eventually slow down, requiring more machines and making the process more expensive. Then Moore's law finally dies due to the cost.
- jlokier 6y ago
  > The measurement accuracy is comparable or exeeding [..] gravitational-wave astronomy A nitpick: You are greatly underestimating the precision in gravitational-wave astronomy. ASML's atomic scale corrections are approximately one billion times larger than the fraction-of-a-proton's width displacements measured by LIGO. From https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts: > At its most sensitive state, LIGO will be able to detect a change in distance between its mirrors 1/10,000th the width of a proton! This is equivalent to measuring the distance to the nearest star (some 4.2 light years away) to an accuracy smaller than the width of a human hair.

FartyMcFarter 6y ago

Look at it and ponder how amazing it is that we've built this with our monkey brains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBdMRUG69uc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBdMRUG69uc So many disciplines of engineering going into this machine!

baybal2 6y ago

> ASML is #2 company in EURO STOXX 50 index with 5.69% weight. And not a small part to gigantic speculative expectations around tech sector in general, which seem to have crossed the Atlantic this year. So much speculative interest has never been a good thing as we know.

baybal2 6y ago

> TWINSCAN NXE:3400C is probably the most expensive machine in the world. Unfortunately no. A number of pieces of military hardware produced in bigger numbers will leave even that pricetag in the dust.

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
Like what?
- baybal2 6y ago
  Fighter jets, bombers, few missile systems, air defence systems, subs, and surface military ships... the list would be long.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  B2 spirit costs more than its weight in gold, clocking in at close to a billion
  - paulnechifor 6y ago
    3.17 billion in 2019 dollars, or 1.11 if you exclude the sunk costs.
  - JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
    That is absolutely incredible.
- shi314 6y ago
  There are plenty aircraft models like B-2 Spirit, F-22 Raptor etc. that cost above $200 million.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- joejerryronnie 6y ago
  Do aircraft carriers count in this context? They’re reasonably expensive to produce.

soygul 6y ago

Bagger 293 probably is the most expensive machine. It costs $100M to build one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_293 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_293

JKCalhoun 6y ago
Fascinating. Had to look it up — the photos of it are mind boggling. I have to say though, from Wikipedia, sounds like there are only a few of them? Sort of one-offs, each of them (so to speak). I kind of think that might disqualify them. Like calling the ISS the most expensive machine?
tda 6y ago
Floating versions of those machines (dredging vessels) are in the 300M range. And the offshore installation vessel Pioneering Spirit came in at 2.6B: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneering_Spirit_(ship) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneering_Spirit_(ship)
Defenestresque 6y ago
The leaders of the free world sat around a secret table... https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow (I know this comment is not exactly in the mood of HN, but this is the one thing I never fail to think of when someone mentions the Bagger family of murderous machines!)

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

If the EU treats this as a strategic capability and not commercial, the spending is much less of a consideration. The advantage that the EU has is in fact ASML. No company can make the 5nm litho systems today, and catching up with the decades of R&D they've invested is not feasible. They are the greatest achievement of science and technology on the planet. [0] The strategy that can work is for the EU to partner with TSMC to build a foundry in the EU that produces at the node they want to intercept (2 nm?). Then, make a business arrangement that puts European scientists and engineers into high-value roles. That would enable the EU to develop the technical skills and keep China from locking it up. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25361028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25361028

Nokinside 6y ago
Pretty much. All big players (US, EU, China) must maintain domestic strategically important industries (aerospace, energy, semiconductors, telecom, drugs/biotech ...) even with government subsidies. The goal of strategic investment is to stay as one of the major players in the industry. Being the leader is not necessary, but letting the deep core and knowledge in manufacturing to erode is strategic weakness.
- f6v 6y ago
  Exactly the opposite happened in Russia and other ex-soviet countries. The factories were sold and dismantled under the pretense of “transitioning to market economy”.
  - tasubotadas 6y ago
    They were non-competitive businesses producing outdated junk and in majority of cases there was no other way to survive apart of being sold for scrap. Some manufacturers that produced basic sellable goods survived (steel foundries, fertilizer makers)
    - lumost 6y ago
      Price signals following the soviet collapse were non functioning ( see the current oligarchs ). It’s hard to know how many of these factories could have adapted over a slightly longer time frame or with some slight investment restructuring. When the price of a corporation falls below their paper assets it tends to attract A certain kind of investor disinterested in long term value. I’d venture a good number of soviet parts suppliers saw their revenues dry up when their clients were dismantled, it wouldn’t have taken more than a few such links in the supply chain being dismantled to break the entire supply chain given the level of centralization.

lumost 6y ago

I’ve heard this often repeated claim about ASML owning the core tech behind TSMC’s 5nm process. However if it was just a question of buying N 200 million dollar machines to launch a 5nm foundry wouldn’t we see dozens of 5nm competitors? Why hasn’t intel , apple, Samsung, or AMD shelled out for 10? Given the size of this commitment it seems clear that there is a lot more to 5nm than the lithography machine.

dmix 6y ago
It also adds the question what ASML has to gain from handing over their technical advantage to some local gov effort. I mean they can get paid but there’s a ton of other companies not starting from scratch they can also make billions off of so I don’t see why some geographic thing is some huge advantage for EU. They already operate in a highly lucrative global market with companies who don’t need to figure anything out. If anything this should be expansion capital or efforts to build more factories locally. Not trying to do it themselves. But hey what do I know. I don’t have multiple countries with lagging tech interests in mind with lots of money to burn.
ksec 6y ago
>it seems clear that there is a lot more to 5nm Yes there is whole part of equation that has nothing to do with ASML. But the point, to over simplify things a lot was that without ASML there are currently zero chance you could get leading edge node working. But even with it you have barely started. Look at Intel, Samsung and Global Foundry.

judge2020 6y ago

> for TSMC gigafactory I thought 'gigafactory' was coined by Tesla/Elon?

Nokinside 6y ago
Should have said Gigafab GIGAFAB® is TSMC's trade mark.
ksec 6y ago
Yes. The correct term for TSMC should be GigaFab, which was used long before Elon coined GigaFactory. It was named as such because of the scale and capacity of those Fab as compared to other pure play competitor. It was also one reason how TSMC manage to win by Economy of Scale.

antisoeu 6y ago

Does ASML belong to "the EU", though, or is it a private company?