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I don't understand this. They made it, surely someone else can too? Are we on the verge of a bunch of industries using hyperspecialization as a monopoly justifi

I don't understand this. They made it, surely someone else can too? Are we on the verge of a bunch of industries using hyperspecialization as a monopoly justifier? I mean this sounds just like what I used to hear pre-Snowden about DARPA and the NSA etc, 20 years ahead of the public.

sennight 5y ago
> 20 years ahead of the public. When the DoD was deeply involved with SV instead of just purchasing top binned COTS? At that time they basically were operating with hardware that far ahead, but that was always relative to the general consumer, it didn't stop companies from paying insane prices for marginal improvements that only HFTs and research labs would care about. Nobody would have bothered trying to bring something so expensive to the broader market - remember the multi-core games Intel played for years before AMD started knocking bread off their table? Also, are you implying that the lack of leaked supercomputing documents is evidence of a commercial technological parity, or did I miss a big reveal (totally possible, haven't been paying attention)? Because as I recall he didn't pull a Manning style dump of operations-level intel (regardless of legality) - he instead coordinated with Greenwald to expose illegal strategic programs (and occasionally a debatable legal one that the DNI lied about in the prior news cycle - which was pretty funny). So I didn't expect any leaks about bleeding edge crypto hardware - because most domestic communication wouldn't need space age tech to break (A5/1 has always been hobbled).
11thEarlOfMar 5y ago
I know. It's difficult to comprehend the scope of science that is required to make this system work as a production machine. For example, the surface they are printing the chip circuits on has layers of material, say, tungsten, that have thicknesses measured in atoms. As in, 'I need a layer of tungsten 100 atoms thick'. At that scale, the surface is 'bumpy' to the point that you must re-focus each time the wafer/lens moves to the next region on the wafer. This is a mechanical adjustment at atomic scale that has to happen very fast, or you'll never get enough wafers through the machine to pay for it. The solution to just this one subsystem of moving and refocusing required a decade of R&D and dozens of scientists and engineers to get fast enough, reliable enough, repeatable enough to be useful in a production setting. Yes, others can make a system like this, with a similar amount of R&D spend and personnel and time. They would have to move faster than ASML to ever catch them. They'd have to budget 20 years, 100s of staff and a very large capital budget. In 20 years, ASML will be that much further down the road. Here is a short animation of the optics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skUCP2f4HIM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skUCP2f4HIM

sennight 5y ago

> 20 years ahead of the public. When the DoD was deeply involved with SV instead of just purchasing top binned COTS? At that time they basically were operating with hardware that far ahead, but that was always relative to the general consumer, it didn't stop companies from paying insane prices for marginal improvements that only HFTs and research labs would care about. Nobody would have bothered trying to bring something so expensive to the broader market - remember the multi-core games Intel played for years before AMD started knocking bread off their table? Also, are you implying that the lack of leaked supercomputing documents is evidence of a commercial technological parity, or did I miss a big reveal (totally possible, haven't been paying attention)? Because as I recall he didn't pull a Manning style dump of operations-level intel (regardless of legality) - he instead coordinated with Greenwald to expose illegal strategic programs (and occasionally a debatable legal one that the DNI lied about in the prior news cycle - which was pretty funny). So I didn't expect any leaks about bleeding edge crypto hardware - because most domestic communication wouldn't need space age tech to break (A5/1 has always been hobbled).

11thEarlOfMar 5y ago

I know. It's difficult to comprehend the scope of science that is required to make this system work as a production machine. For example, the surface they are printing the chip circuits on has layers of material, say, tungsten, that have thicknesses measured in atoms. As in, 'I need a layer of tungsten 100 atoms thick'. At that scale, the surface is 'bumpy' to the point that you must re-focus each time the wafer/lens moves to the next region on the wafer. This is a mechanical adjustment at atomic scale that has to happen very fast, or you'll never get enough wafers through the machine to pay for it. The solution to just this one subsystem of moving and refocusing required a decade of R&D and dozens of scientists and engineers to get fast enough, reliable enough, repeatable enough to be useful in a production setting. Yes, others can make a system like this, with a similar amount of R&D spend and personnel and time. They would have to move faster than ASML to ever catch them. They'd have to budget 20 years, 100s of staff and a very large capital budget. In 20 years, ASML will be that much further down the road. Here is a short animation of the optics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skUCP2f4HIM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skUCP2f4HIM