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Mostly these machines are assembled from a combination of proprietary parts manufactured using regular machine tools by contract manufacturers, and from sub-uni
by nwiswell 4y ago
Mostly these machines are assembled from a combination of proprietary parts manufactured using regular machine tools by contract manufacturers, and from sub-units purchased from specialist suppliers.
For example: proprietary parts including optics, wafer chucks, process chambers, structural panels, etc are manufactured to spec by contractors. Pumps, valves, motion control boxes, wafer robots, loadports, servers, etc are all bought from suppliers.
There's not really any magic. The materials used for the parts are sometimes exotic (e.g. single crystal silicon, single crystal quartz, yttria coating, PEEK, sapphire, etc), but the contract manufacturers use the same old boring machine tools that everyone does.
- hashtag-til 4y agoOh come on… you just broke the myth I had on my mind for many years, that this company was some magical craftwork shop for mechanical parts. Anyway, nice to get a bit more realistic view. Thanks! Eager to hear more about the software, which I heard some crazy stuff about how it is engineered and tested.
- nwiswell 4y agoSorry :) I should not really say too much, but the software tends to be kind of a trainwreck. WFE companies are definitely engineering-first organizations, but software is a second-order concern in general since it is a check-the-box requirement rather than a truly differentiating product feature, and companies like Lam and AMAT which are headquartered in the Valley have serious trouble competing for software talent. Moreover the software has a multi-decade pedigree with a concordant amount of technical debt. Pretty much everything is C++. Anyway, there are fairly well-specified standards issued by SEMI like SECS-II and GEM that govern interoperability. In my (highly biased) opinion, the really interesting stuff is the real-time control systems that operate on millisecond timescales to make minute adjustments on the fly using data from onboard sensors to improve process outcomes.
- markus_zhang 4y agoAh, multiple decade C++ codebase! My dream. Do they hire juniors in Canada?
- phkahler 4y agoI commented last week about floating point issues in a simple low pass filter. Someone responded confirming similar issues working on nanometer resolution servos. I just figure he's from ASML or similar. It seems someone from everywhere is here on HN.
- cactusplant7374 4y ago> There's not really any magic. I've read that it would take China at least 10 years to get to ASML's current level. It might not be magic but there must be a lot of unknowns when starting from scratch.
- markus_zhang 4y ago10 years is probably an underestimate given then current geopolitical condition.
- pphysch 4y agoUnderestimate? Unless Washington aggressively nukes mainland China, recent overperformance by a post-Zero-COVID China suggests 10y is an overestimate. Existential stress is an excellent motivator for rapid innovation. Or did we learn nothing from the 20th century?
- mgfist 4y agoThe magic must be in the orchestration then, I'd suppose. Otherwise China wouldn't be struggling so much.
- nwiswell 4y agoPartly orchestration, but mostly in the design of those proprietary parts. There's decades of institutional knowledge and engineering iterations involved here. IP is a huge concern because if a Chinese competitor got their hands on the engineering drawings, there would not be a whole lot to stop them from producing copies. Patents are viewed somewhat skeptically, since if they are not actually enforceable against a likely offender, they simply serve as a disclosure mechanism.