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That's like saying "all carpenters use the same hammers, how can one be better than the other?"—there's a lot more than goes into chip manufacturing than just t
by dvt 3y ago
That's like saying "all carpenters use the same hammers, how can one be better than the other?"—there's a lot more than goes into chip manufacturing than just the lithography machines. Not to mention that the lithography machines themselves are highly customizable and can technically work with different optical systems (not just the Carl Zeiss ones) and with different wafers (not just silicon ones), so there's a lot of room for experimentation.
- drlobster 3y ago[dead]
- _hypx 3y agoBut we don’t live in a world where we expect carpenters to double the complexity of their output every 2 years. At some point, the theoretic limits of the tooling becomes a thing. I’m pretty sure you are confused about the optical system. All of the lithography machines have the same setup inside because only one company makes them (ASML). The next big upgrade involves upgrading the optics, but no one has that upgrade yet. We know, because again only company makes them and they haven’t produced them yet.
- dvt 3y ago> All of the lithography machines have the same setup inside because only one company makes them (ASML). I've definitely read papers where universities fiddle with the internals of ASML machines, including the optics, to try out different things. I'd imagine R&D departments at Intel, Nvidia, etc. probably do the same, but I'm no expert.
- jjoonathan 3y agohttps://youtu.be/-EhDlXx3okU?t=203 https://youtu.be/-EhDlXx3okU?t=203 No, that's not how it works. Dialing in a process is extremely difficult, expensive, and iterative, and a fab has to do a lot of dialing in to make a billion chips per year that each have a billion transistors which will do a billion calculations per second for a billion seconds with zero errors. Give or take a few orders of magnitude here or there. It's a long tail that has to be chopped off -- so long that the number of players capable of chopping it off has gone from three digits to 3.
- panarky 3y ago> It's a long tail that has to be chopped off Those ASML litho machines are astoundingly complex, with more parts and a more complex supply chain than a Boeing or Airbus commercial airliner. So many parts that each part and subassembly must have an outrageously long mean time between failure, something like 16 years, in order for the entire machine to be sufficiently reliable. No wonder only one company is able to make them.
- ksec 3y agoJust a reminder you are on HN.