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I do wonder if this is indicating a flaw in ASML’s business model more than anything else. The entire (massive) CPU business hinges on these machines in 2021 a

I do wonder if this is indicating a flaw in ASML’s business model more than anything else. The entire (massive) CPU business hinges on these machines in 2021 and given that I’m quite certain ASML hold substantial patents it seems like they should be offering these machines for per-wafer fees rather than selling them directly to TSMC and Samsung for them to print endless mountains of cash with them. AMD and Apple are utterly reliant on these devices, and no-one outside of tech even knows they exist. If no-one sees the massive value your company contributes that’s a problem with PR.

inglor_cz 5y ago
EUV lithography is a strange beast. It requires extremely clean rooms and a lot of practical know-how and skills from the humans around it. Few companies are in position to actually use EUV machines to produce chips. So, in practice, ASML and the few companies are dependent on each other and probably found local optimum of coexistence. ASML does not want to push several top-level tech companies into search for alternatives and the top level tech companies do not want to waste their talent on replication of an already existing product unless necessary.
- RandomWorker 5y ago
  This is very true, some one who has interacted with the tech in the past. It’s mind bending physics that if you do the cal a on a napkin you could do it, but all the materials have 1000 tweaks to deal with imperfections. They are also so far ahead, after uv it will be X-ray, and even electron etching. They are developing tech 10 years ago that still will get them further. At some point there will be enough power, for general consumer products to function just fine. Once a laptop can run email/web/word/excel smoothly, which I think is like 90% pc use, on a whole day battery. I think we don’t need more speed. It might be at that point, that some players step in. Try to build machines that work at similar quality. However, why not just get a second hand ASML? As far as I know once a new generation get bought the old goes to a lower tier processor manufacturers.
  - zardo 5y ago
    > Once a laptop can run email/web/word/excel smoothly, which I think is like 90% pc use, on a whole day battery. I think we don’t need more speed. Or we can build a more resource hungry software.
    - gnu8 5y ago
      The old adage was that Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away.
  - codeulike 5y ago
    Once a laptop can run email/web/word/excel smoothly, which I think is like 90% pc use, on a whole day battery. I think we don’t need more speed Thats not how it works, software is a gas that expands to fill all the available performance space until it all slows down and we need better hardware again.
    - ls65536 5y ago
      This sounds a bit like Wirth's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
      - j245 5y ago
        I’ve always wondered - would the effort to develop such software be lower, because the hardware is more forgiving. In which case you are trading human (software development) time for hardware resources. If that were the case, it seems like an okay-ish trade off to me tbh.
        FredPret 5y ago
        Brain time > CPU time
    - Merrill 5y ago
      But suppose some nation decided that they could devote more software development resources to designing efficient software, and that they could limit processing intensive applications (like online gaming?). Conceivably they could run the economically important IT functions of the country using less powerful, easier to manufacture, less power hungry greener, and readily available semiconductors.
siscia 5y ago
Semiconductor companies hold a big stack of ASML.
ksec 5y ago
In an over simplify model you would expect that. But in reality there is so much going on having EUV doesn't immediately guarantee success, just ask Samsung about it. And at what point will Carl Zeiss do the same to ASML when they are solely relying on their optics? TSMC uses their own in house pellicle ( as suspected for some time and only recently confirmed in an investor meeting ) There also dozens of other companies in the Foundry supply chain that are also critical to the entire process that just hasn't reached mainstream media. In an investor meeting, ASML told its audience that TSMC knows more about how to operate their EUV Twinscan then they do. And no, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC are no longer ASML's shareholder, as somehow constantly being pointed out in various form of social media including HN. They only invested in I think 2011 / 2012 to help fund the development of EUV. They have since reduced their investment once this was done. It is also funny you mention this, because I am sure if ASML were an American company they will absolutely do that to maximise their profits. But ASML is Dutch. And ASML got to where they are today with the help of TSMC. It used to a fight between Canon and Nikon. But that is another story.
MangoCoffee 5y ago
"ASML agreed that 55 percent of the components used in its commercial EUV systems sold in the United States would be sourced from U.S.-based suppliers, which Moniz said will keep high-paying jobs in the United States" ASML doesn't hold the core patents. The U.S. Department of Energy allowed ASML to join the EUV LLC. ASML bought Cymer for exactly that reason. https://www.eetimes.com/u-s-gives-ok-to-asml-on-euv-effort/ https://www.eetimes.com/u-s-gives-ok-to-asml-on-euv-effort/
xyzzy21 5y ago
Not really. It's that they have ZERO competition AND the problem of inventing/manufacturing the technology is so hard that no one can afford to compete and its barely viable for ASML as it is. The other issue is that $150M for a stepper is more than an order of magnitude more costly than the previous stepper technology used for 20+ years. To make that work, very expensive CAD tools were required to grossly violate normal diffraction laws (but obviously not the laws of physics themselves). This is done with "multi-patterning" which uses multiple exposures of the same targets to attain sub-diffraction limit dimensions. It requires many additional process steps to do this and it's mathematically/CAD intense. And finally for fabs, the throughput of ASML EUV is about 1/50th of the prior steppers (but the previous steppers required 5-10 additional multi-patterning stepper exposure steps in the process to attain similar results. The general rule of thumb is an additional process step is 1/2 day of throughput so the old technology would add a week or two of throughput but the lower throughput of EUV only saves about 50% of that so the throughput is worse or a wash. As it is, the wavelength of EUV is 13.5 nm so the diffraction limit is still only 6.25 nm feature size (so 7 nm is clean without multi-patterning but below that you need to return to multi-patterning but not as many steps added (yet). The "Net Net" is that yes EUV is the only way get deep nanometer dimensions (<25 nm) easily and cheaply BUT EUV is economically marginal for both stepper vendor and fab. The former is why no competitor wants to jump in (plus patents as well). The latter is why it's certainly necessary if the commitment to deep nanometer is life-or-death for the fab. A LOT of fabs have decided that there are better markets above those dimensions that they can tap so they've written-off deep nanometer and switched orthogonal to different market value propositions. Fun Fact 1: another common name of EUV is "soft X-rays". As such, conventional lens-based optics DOES NOT WORK, so the ASML system uses the only technology that works for X-ray optics: low-angle, glancing metal mirrors. A well known other application of this is X-ray telescopes in space. Fun Fact 2: the optical power level at the mask is less than 10 watts which is barely enough to expose the photoresist. This requires far longer exposures with perfect mechanical stability to hold the mask-created image exactly still. This is why the throughput is so low compared to prior steppers. This is also where much of the capital cost comes from: stabilizing mechanical components far beyond what prior technologies required.

inglor_cz 5y ago

EUV lithography is a strange beast. It requires extremely clean rooms and a lot of practical know-how and skills from the humans around it. Few companies are in position to actually use EUV machines to produce chips. So, in practice, ASML and the few companies are dependent on each other and probably found local optimum of coexistence. ASML does not want to push several top-level tech companies into search for alternatives and the top level tech companies do not want to waste their talent on replication of an already existing product unless necessary.

RandomWorker 5y ago
This is very true, some one who has interacted with the tech in the past. It’s mind bending physics that if you do the cal a on a napkin you could do it, but all the materials have 1000 tweaks to deal with imperfections. They are also so far ahead, after uv it will be X-ray, and even electron etching. They are developing tech 10 years ago that still will get them further. At some point there will be enough power, for general consumer products to function just fine. Once a laptop can run email/web/word/excel smoothly, which I think is like 90% pc use, on a whole day battery. I think we don’t need more speed. It might be at that point, that some players step in. Try to build machines that work at similar quality. However, why not just get a second hand ASML? As far as I know once a new generation get bought the old goes to a lower tier processor manufacturers.
- zardo 5y ago
  > Once a laptop can run email/web/word/excel smoothly, which I think is like 90% pc use, on a whole day battery. I think we don’t need more speed. Or we can build a more resource hungry software.
  - gnu8 5y ago
    The old adage was that Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away.
- codeulike 5y ago
  Once a laptop can run email/web/word/excel smoothly, which I think is like 90% pc use, on a whole day battery. I think we don’t need more speed Thats not how it works, software is a gas that expands to fill all the available performance space until it all slows down and we need better hardware again.
  - ls65536 5y ago
    This sounds a bit like Wirth's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
    - j245 5y ago
      I’ve always wondered - would the effort to develop such software be lower, because the hardware is more forgiving. In which case you are trading human (software development) time for hardware resources. If that were the case, it seems like an okay-ish trade off to me tbh.
      - FredPret 5y ago
        Brain time > CPU time
  - Merrill 5y ago
    But suppose some nation decided that they could devote more software development resources to designing efficient software, and that they could limit processing intensive applications (like online gaming?). Conceivably they could run the economically important IT functions of the country using less powerful, easier to manufacture, less power hungry greener, and readily available semiconductors.

siscia 5y ago

Semiconductor companies hold a big stack of ASML.

ksec 5y ago

In an over simplify model you would expect that. But in reality there is so much going on having EUV doesn't immediately guarantee success, just ask Samsung about it. And at what point will Carl Zeiss do the same to ASML when they are solely relying on their optics? TSMC uses their own in house pellicle ( as suspected for some time and only recently confirmed in an investor meeting ) There also dozens of other companies in the Foundry supply chain that are also critical to the entire process that just hasn't reached mainstream media. In an investor meeting, ASML told its audience that TSMC knows more about how to operate their EUV Twinscan then they do. And no, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC are no longer ASML's shareholder, as somehow constantly being pointed out in various form of social media including HN. They only invested in I think 2011 / 2012 to help fund the development of EUV. They have since reduced their investment once this was done. It is also funny you mention this, because I am sure if ASML were an American company they will absolutely do that to maximise their profits. But ASML is Dutch. And ASML got to where they are today with the help of TSMC. It used to a fight between Canon and Nikon. But that is another story.

MangoCoffee 5y ago

"ASML agreed that 55 percent of the components used in its commercial EUV systems sold in the United States would be sourced from U.S.-based suppliers, which Moniz said will keep high-paying jobs in the United States" ASML doesn't hold the core patents. The U.S. Department of Energy allowed ASML to join the EUV LLC. ASML bought Cymer for exactly that reason. https://www.eetimes.com/u-s-gives-ok-to-asml-on-euv-effort/ https://www.eetimes.com/u-s-gives-ok-to-asml-on-euv-effort/

xyzzy21 5y ago

Not really. It's that they have ZERO competition AND the problem of inventing/manufacturing the technology is so hard that no one can afford to compete and its barely viable for ASML as it is. The other issue is that $150M for a stepper is more than an order of magnitude more costly than the previous stepper technology used for 20+ years. To make that work, very expensive CAD tools were required to grossly violate normal diffraction laws (but obviously not the laws of physics themselves). This is done with "multi-patterning" which uses multiple exposures of the same targets to attain sub-diffraction limit dimensions. It requires many additional process steps to do this and it's mathematically/CAD intense. And finally for fabs, the throughput of ASML EUV is about 1/50th of the prior steppers (but the previous steppers required 5-10 additional multi-patterning stepper exposure steps in the process to attain similar results. The general rule of thumb is an additional process step is 1/2 day of throughput so the old technology would add a week or two of throughput but the lower throughput of EUV only saves about 50% of that so the throughput is worse or a wash. As it is, the wavelength of EUV is 13.5 nm so the diffraction limit is still only 6.25 nm feature size (so 7 nm is clean without multi-patterning but below that you need to return to multi-patterning but not as many steps added (yet). The "Net Net" is that yes EUV is the only way get deep nanometer dimensions (<25 nm) easily and cheaply BUT EUV is economically marginal for both stepper vendor and fab. The former is why no competitor wants to jump in (plus patents as well). The latter is why it's certainly necessary if the commitment to deep nanometer is life-or-death for the fab. A LOT of fabs have decided that there are better markets above those dimensions that they can tap so they've written-off deep nanometer and switched orthogonal to different market value propositions. Fun Fact 1: another common name of EUV is "soft X-rays". As such, conventional lens-based optics DOES NOT WORK, so the ASML system uses the only technology that works for X-ray optics: low-angle, glancing metal mirrors. A well known other application of this is X-ray telescopes in space. Fun Fact 2: the optical power level at the mask is less than 10 watts which is barely enough to expose the photoresist. This requires far longer exposures with perfect mechanical stability to hold the mask-created image exactly still. This is why the throughput is so low compared to prior steppers. This is also where much of the capital cost comes from: stabilizing mechanical components far beyond what prior technologies required.