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ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
- maxalbarello 6mo agoFor anyone interested in the topic I highly recommend this Veritasium video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0
- Zealotux 6mo agoGreat video and I think the only way to truly grasp the complexity of EUV lithography as a layman.
- jasode 6mo agoThe Veritasium video is good but their "newscast" style with constant back-and-forth cuts to talking heads can make the presentation a bit disjointed. The more straightforward video of ASML EUV is from Branch Education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2482h_TNwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2482h_TNwg Because that vid gives an overview of the whole machine, it gives context to what each scientist is talking about in the Veritasium interviews.
- maxalbarello 6mo agoThank you! The video you recommended definitely goes more in depth. I still like Veritasium's style more but it's just personal preference ofc
- alfiedotwtf 6mo agoYeah… when I’m eating breakfast, a lecture is not what I’m after. I watched that Veritasium video a while back and was glued to it. Any other presentation style and I probably would have completely skipped it (thinking I’ll watch it another time knowing I would never go back to it).
- Isamu 6mo agoI recommend the Asianometry channel, he has a good series of videos about ASML, TSMC, chip fab supply chain, the Japan photo resist monopoly, etc https://m.youtube.com/c/Asianometry/videos?ra=m https://m.youtube.com/c/Asianometry/videos?ra=m
- ozarkerD 6mo agoAsianometry is fantastic
- moffkalast 6mo agoIf there's really such a bottleneck around ASML, why not design some extra chips for legacy processes that presumably already have well known design workflows? I mean we're not talking AMD FX and Core 2 Duo here, it's Raptor Lake and Zen 3, it's perfectly viable and still being sold in droves right now.
- irdc 6mo agoThat’s what the likes of AMD with their chiplet design have been doing. There’s also the issue of older process nodes not being profitable enough anymore, which explaines why at the height of the chip supply crunch older ARM chips were in short supply but there was ample stock of the 20nm feature-sized RP2040.
- moffkalast 6mo agoThis is gonna sound super dumb, but I'm not sure how they aren't being profitable if there are shortages, just price things beyond break even level? The average person can't even tell the difference between a Core 5 and a Core 5 Ultra, you can practically sell them at the same price and I'm not even sure they'd notice when actually using them. The performance jump is relatively minor and the bottlenecks are elsewhere.
- MadnessASAP 6mo agoIt mostly comes down to the consumer market not being significant enough by itself. A consumer may not notice a 10% increase in performance per watt or dollar. A large office building probably will, and a datacenter definitely will. I don't think I'm being entirely hyperbolic when I say the consumer market only exists to put devices that can connect to and feed the datacenter loads into the general populations hands.
- irdc 6mo agoPart of those prices aren't something the manufacturer can adjust. Whether you're building 60nm or 20nm chips, you need pretty much the same silicon wafers, the same ultra pure water, the same chemicals and the same personnel. And as a bonus, you're not gonna be getting as many of the same chips on that wafer. And sure, a chip layout can be shrunk; but that requires a whole new recertification cycle.
- ForHackernews 6mo agoThey might be the most complex mass-produced commercial machines but the Large Hadron Collider has a plausible claim to the title of "world's most complex machine" https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/103591-largest-machine https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/103591-la...
- bob1029 6mo agoI think something like this wins that category: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Interconnection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Interconnection
- ForHackernews 6mo agoI suppose it's partly a semantic question that hinges on what you count as a single "machine" and what's a system or a network.
- cousinbryce 6mo agoThe fact that there’s more than one copy of TWINSCAN EXE 5k seems important
- Rexxar 6mo agoIt's strange to count this as single machine. But if we go this way, the north Chinese interconnection and the continental Europe interconnection are bigger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_synchronous_grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_synchronous_grid).
- carlovalenti 6mo agoagree
- mytailorisrich 6mo agoIt is unavoidable that, at some point, China will have its own matching or better machine because they obviously how incredibly strategically important it is.
- codeulike 6mo ago"at some point" is doing a lot of work there. How long do you think?
- dnnddidiej 6mo ago30 years
- KermitTheFrog 6mo agoNon-zero chances - yes. Unavoidable - I wouldn't be so sure. I can't imagine how many top human-hours and cutting-edge inventions involved to construct this machine. And much of this simply cannot be stolen or bought, no matter how much money you have.
- mytailorisrich 6mo agoIt has never happened in the history of the world that a company or country could maintain its technological advance indefinitely. Either China will catch up on this or that particular technology will become obsolete. But it is certain that they won't stay behind forever (measured in a small number of decades at most).
- codeulike 6mo agoRight but if you dont say how long it will take them, youre not really saying anything.
- mytailorisrich 6mo ago> measured in a small number of decades at most
- Amorymeltzer 6mo agoIt's been mentioned before, but Chris Miller's Chip War from a few years back is an excellent, very-readable book on the topic. Goes into depth on the history and development of chips and their production. He did the rounds on the interviews back then, and it's definitely worth a read. The EUV stuff is great, but I particularly liked his history on how the USSR was always going to lose and how integral Apollo really was.
- kens 6mo agoChip War is an interesting book, but it has a lot of errors, which made it frustrating to read. For instance, it said that vacuum tube computers were hardly usable because they attracted moths, so they required constant debugging and were only used in specialized applications like cryptography. This is wrong in many ways. Most notably, Grace Hopper's story of the moth was in the Harvard Mark II computer, a relay computer. (I saw the actual moth yesterday, by the way.) Vacuum tube computers were highly popular, selling in the thousands for numerous general-purpose applications. And contrary to Chip War, ENIAC was not used to compute artillery tables during WWII, because it wasn't running until the war ended. This was just a half-page section in the book, but it messed up a lot of things.
- Amorymeltzer 6mo agoDon't have it in front of me so I can't comment on the actual language, but wasn't ENIAC designed for the purpose of firing tables, but the time it was "completed" got used for e.g. H-bomb?
- kens 6mo agoYes. The statement in Chip War, like many others, is close to correct but still wrong. When a book gets many things wrong in an area that I know, it makes me worry about its accuracy in areas that I don't know. (See Gell-Mann Amnesia.)
- maxalbarello 6mo agoand yet not even close to the complexity of the human brain
- jstummbillig 6mo ago> By betting on extreme ultraviolet lithography long before it worked, ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips. Makes one wonder: Would we be much better off of worse off if we reshaped society to do more of things, where a new technology is unlikely to work but highly beneficial in the limits? Would we sooner have 10 additional ASMLs or waste a lot of resources?
- danielheath 6mo agoI mean, it’s been tried; a reading of relevant historical texts would give you lots of ammunition to support either argument.
- IAmBroom 6mo agoBig gambles have big risks. It's the gambler's folly, after a big win (ASML's EUV) to say, gee, we should have bought more lottery tickets! Next time, it all goes on red! What is no longer mentioned is that ASML made another big gamble at the time they started on EUV. They decided to make an all-in-one chip making machine that took silicon and output chips (instead of matrices of chip circuits laid out on a wafer). On paper, the machine would save a lot of money for the fab houses. IRL: no one asked for it, and no one was willing to risk their entire production on a single, untried, swiss army knife of a fabricator. The whole program was a wash. People were reassigned and the project died a very quick death. ASML lost a ton of money on this misguided attempt, but not enough to choke them. So, they rolled the dice twice, and one gamble paid off handsomely. If it went the other way, they'd be a smaller company, and Moore's Law would be overshooting reality. If neither paid off, they'd be DOA.
- smueller1234 6mo agoThe timelines matter as well: They were working on EUV at Zeiss (who make the lensing/mirroring systems) already in 2005. That's about 20 years of development.
- IAmBroom 6mo agoOh, AMSL was designing components of the EUV system by 2005. So, more likely 25 years!
- hackrmn 6mo ago> These machines are roughly the size of double-decker buses. To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks. They are the world’s most complex objects. Each contains over one hundred thousand components, all of which have to be perfectly calibrated for the machine to produce light consistently at the right wavelength. As a software engineer by trade, the above parable communicates to me two very important things and little else by comparison: that the machines are ultimately fragile and nowhere near "optimised", since the complexity is by own admission substantial to put it mildly; the machine is not a commodity, exactly, one of the million pieces breaking subtly likely renders it inoperable; its cost is proportional to its complexity (read: astronomic); by mere fact it's a focal point of geopolitics only supports the rest of the argument it's a machine of current stone age much like siege engines were at some point the closely guarded secret win-or-lose multiplers of feudal culture. I mean it's certainly interesting to read about the complexity, but reducing the complexity and commoditising the whole thing is what's really going to be impressive I think :-) I am probably speaking out against the nerd in us, and none of what I said should detract from enjoying the article or the subject, it's just that I think complexity here is the giveaway of us not having conquered UVL exactly, not quite yet :-) Or maybe we lack the right materials which would allow us to reduce the machine or make it less complex or prone to calibration related errors.
- svantana 6mo agoIndeed, all this reminds me of the marvel that is mechanical timekeeping - incredibly complex engineering that would ultimately be surpassed by dirt cheap electronics. What is the corresponding revolution in chip production? I imagine something like FPGAs for litography - a wafer that can somehow work on another wafer in a sandwich-like configuration. Such a process could potentially improve on each iteration and thus get very good, very fast.
- clark_dent 6mo agoComplexity doesn't necessarily mean it's suboptimal. Lithography and nanofab are usually doing a whole range of disparate and wildly exotic processes with extreme vacuum, plasmas, electron guns; any number of crazy and dangerous process gases like H2, HF, or silane; and occasionally raw materials like iridium and rhodium. And that's all without the actual lithography. When your margin for error is measured in single atoms and your number of features per die outnumber the planet's population 2:1, physical laws start to stand in the way of simplification. The one 'machine' encompasses more disciplines than most universities offer. It's really a whole bleeding edge factory compressed into a room.
- scotty79 6mo agoI'm pretty sure that's the most bizarre light source on the planet: https://youtu.be/B2482h_TNwg?t=929 https://youtu.be/B2482h_TNwg?t=929
- IAmBroom 6mo ago(The video describes the actual lithographic laser.) And it's a source of serious hazardous waste products. It's a tin-ion laser, operating in an ultra-pure vacuum, on an unbelievably high-energy band (even laser "lines" have definable bandwidths). There's really not a lot of wiggle room in materials selection for the laser.
- scotty79 6mo agoI wouldn't call it a laser. Lasers are just a forming and heating mechanism. The actual light source is tin plasma.
- amelius 6mo agoIt looks complicated but I suspect that 90% of what I see in that picture is just a giant refrigerator.
- namero999 6mo agoNot even close.
- amelius 6mo agoGemini tells me: calling an ASML machine a "giant refrigerator" is actually a pretty sophisticated observation. While it doesn't store milk, a massive portion of that plumbing is dedicated to thermal management and vacuum systems. (...)
- IAmBroom 6mo ago"and vacuum systems" is the key here. The refrigeration is a well-solved issue. There's impeller-type vacuum engines, which is what most people think about. Then there's multiple-stage fans, where the purpose is to overcome random atomic vectors: an atom flying the wrong direction is more likely than not to hit a fan blade and bounce vaguely toward the output direction. Extra stages increase the odds of outward vectors, instead of rebounding off walls in some unhelpful direction. These are needed when the pressure is already so low that gas atoms don't hit each other, so they act like particles instead of gases. There's also molecular getter pumps, that are reactive coatings inside the vacuum. Their purpose is to permanently adhere any stray molecules that tend to cling to surfaces (like H2O), so they won't eventually decouple and ruin the vacuum. Each is used to reach increasing levels of "vacuum", which is more like "single-molecule denial gates" at that point.
- MrBuddyCasino 6mo agoRule of thumb: when something is being called "The World's Most Complex Machine", its either CERN's Large Hadron Collider or an ASML EUV machine. In this case, its the latter.
- phyzome 6mo agoWhereas if it's the largest machine, they're talking about the electrical grid.
- xattt 6mo ago> To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks. Is this just restating the size of the same shipment three times?
- aa-jv 6mo agoNo, its emphasizing that the size of the shipment necessitates multiple high capacity logistic steps.
- MarleTangible 6mo agoSo 40 containers carried transported by 20 trucks and then by 3 cargo planes?
- _nhacker 6mo agoHey, author of the piece here. Glad people seem to have enjoyed it. If you're looking for more sources on ASML/EUV I put together a bibliography of things I looked at while writing the piece https://neilhacker.com/2026/04/28/asml-article-bibliography/ https://neilhacker.com/2026/04/28/asml-article-bibliography/
- chirau 6mo agoWho ruled this the most complex machine? And by what metric?
- rigonkulous 6mo agoThere's a thing in writing where you can make bold claims in order to give the reader an idea about what the rest of the article is going to be about - that's whats happening here, a bit of editorializing .. but do you know of a more complex machine than the ASML/TSMC production line, in terms of inputs/outputs? I think, if one were used to calculating cyclomatic complexity, such a headline is not only amusing, but also fascinating even if it is 'wrong' by .. some value system .. because the thought exercise to come up with a more cyclomatically complex machine, is rather a fruitful challenge. And that is why writers should be allowed to editorialize, because .. after all .. this is a thought-provoking article, isn't it ..
- i_am_a_peasant 6mo agoso it had an unusual amount of inputs and outputs? that's the measure?
- rigonkulous 6mo agoFor this thought experiment I would welcome you to contribute another measure besides cyclomatic complexity as a means of ascertaining the truth of the matter, because after all complexity is multi-dimensional, but on the basis of number of actual things that have to be qualitatively measured in order for the machine to function as intended, I can think of a few other big machines that would be in scope, but - as a person who does complex systems work professionally - I'm pretty sure that the editorializing was a way to kick off some neurons in the intended audience, and not much more than that. However, let us continue to postulate there are other forms of complexity that can be measured - what would you suggest are the other 3 or 4 contenders for the title?
- scaradim 6mo agoWow. I see the head of Charlie Chaplin inside the center machine unit. Do you see it?
- jmyeet 6mo agoEvery part of this technology is astounding and you need a reasonable basis in physics to truly appreciate just how astounding it is. And the tolerances are so ridiculously precise, it boggles the mind. Even before you get to the lithography machine you need silicon. For a long time we've known how this is done. You create what's called a boule, which is where you create a cylinder of almost pure silicon by seeding molten silicon with a crystal and slowly forming it. You then cut the boule into the silicon discs we often see. That machining and polishing itself has to be super-precise. But I can remember when the tolerance for impurities was at 1 part per 300 million. I read recently that even 1 part per billion is now too impure. And that makes sense. The biggest chips are what? 80 billion transistors? I seem to remember NVidia makes chips in that range (or rather TSMC does for NVidia). At 1ppb that might make ruining your chip just too likely. So my point is that there's a whole industry to make super-pure silicon which itself took amazing advancements and without that this machine would be a lot less useful. Another part that amazes me is just how pervasive multiple layers on chips have become. I can remember when that was novel. The upper layers are made by cheaper machines with EUV reserved for a transistor "base layer" where all the interconnects really are. It's amazing just how many problems had to be solved to make this posible.
- dzonga 6mo agoone thing not mentioned is how China is using the older tech DUV's to print advanced chips since replicating EUVs is close to impossible.
- Liftyee 6mo agoIf ASML could do it, China will also do it. It's just a matter of development time and resources, both of which are plentiful in China.
- Danox 6mo agoDidn’t Japan just recently restarted their own project in this area? https://www.rapidus.inc/en/news_topics/information/rapidus-begins-installation-of-japans-first-euv-lithography-machinery-for-semiconductor-mass-production-en/ https://www.rapidus.inc/en/news_topics/information/rapidus-b... https://www.semimedia.cc/18196.html https://www.semimedia.cc/18196.html If China and Japan are currently working on it, certainly South Korea is not far behind.
- nightshift1 6mo agoThey did. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/12/18/tech/china-west-ai-chips/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/12/18/tech/china-...
- EvanAnderson 6mo agoThe Omega Tau podcast visited ASML and did an episode a number of years ago: http://traffic.libsyn.com/omegataupodcast/omegatau-49-chipProductionAndWaferscanners.mp3 http://traffic.libsyn.com/omegataupodcast/omegatau-49-chipPr...
- SideburnsOfDoom 6mo agoOn a tangent and out of curiosity: The image of "The electromagnetic spectrum" shows "London radio waves" on the far right (i.e. longest wavelengths). Is this the correct term? Why do these long radio waves have the name "London"? Unfortunately all that I get googling the term is a guide to local FM station frequencies.
- perilunar 6mo agoI think it's an error. Should be long-wave (LW), as opposed to medium- and short-wave.
- morpheos137 6mo agoMy understanding is step size has divergred from physical feature size for the past decade or so eg. 3 nm step (marketing) may actually be 42 nm physical. so in other words progress has slowed (diminishing returns to inverse scaling)
- t1234s 6mo agoIsn't the ISS supposed to be the most complicated machine ever built by humans?
- zamadatix 6mo agoI usually hear it as "one of the most expensive single projects" rather than the most complex. I'd bet there any many more complex, the LHC comes to mind.
- i_am_a_peasant 6mo agoIn terms of precission engineering LHC is for sure more complex. But then again ISS is made out of many life-critical systems. In safety critical systems a the actual hardware may look simpler in some ways than stuff you see on the bleeding edge for that category of product, but then the complexity is in turning it into something that can be safety certifiable. Just different math entirely. ie there's lots of fun applications for radar, some of them have very complex math involved in manufacturing processes. Then you got automotive radar, you mainly need to get the position and velocity of some objects, the math is simpler. But you have to certify that stuff for ASIL-D, no one makes you ASIL-D radars, so you combine multiple radars. 3'Bs make a D as the saying goes.. Then you gotta worry about BOM costs because you want to ship 10 million cars..
- AtNightWeCode 6mo agoISS is complex because of the huge amount parts to assemble it. When it comes to precise technical cutting edge tech ASML is easily on top.
- kens 6mo agoIs the ASML machine actually the world's most complex machine under some metric, or is this a claim that someone made up? I.e., did someone actually compare the ASML machine to the Space Shuttle, LHC, Internet, and so forth and show that it is more complex under some definition? (I've done various historical questions, so I'm sensitive to how statements are sourced.) An orthogonal question is what makes sense as a measure of complexity. One could use "number of parts" (whatever that means): NASA says the Space Shuttle has 2.5 million moving parts, while the article says the ASML machine has over 100,000 components. Another issue is how to deal with composition. A TSMC fab is obviously more complex than a lithography machine since it contains a lithography machine, but maybe the fab doesn't count as a "machine". Another issue is complexity vs parts: a 32-Gb DRAM chip has about 68 billion transistors and capacitors, but it's not extremely complex, since it's mostly the same thing repeated. And then there's the question of distribution: can you really count the Internet as one "thing"?
- ChrisMarshallNY 6mo agoI've heard that US nuclear subs actually take the crown, but the design is so secret, that there's no way to verify.
- pfortuny 6mo agoAn aircraft carrier would like a word.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6mo agoDepends. Are the aircraft counted? In either case, the secret design has the same effect, but sub secrets are the top of the top of top secret. Spies that leak sub secrets, spend a long time in Leavenworth.
- kryogen1c 6mo ago>> nuclear sub >aircraft carrier Having served on both, this is actually a pretty interesting comparison (at least to me). Carriers are simply larger, so they likely win by scale, but im not sure on a more per-(sub)system basis. Carriers have a lot of aircraft handling systems that subs dont, elevators and hangers. Also the carrier has group c&c stuff. Subs have a lot of stealth systems carriers don't, being that they're visible from space. Lots of dive related stuff, o2/co2 handlers. They both have weapons systems, hvac, propulsion, distillation, steam generators, reactors, air compressor, many others. Not obvious to me which one is more complex!
- thelastgallon 6mo agoI thought the power grid is the most complex machine. The power grid is a gigantic machine spanning a country or significant parts of a country. It includes all the power production plants, millions of miles of transmission and distribution lines, substations for transmission and distribution, and billions of devices consuming power for residential and industrial use. The grid ensures these billions of devices are operating at 60 Hz frequency—all the time. The grid's primary function is to maintain this frequency, no matter what.
- lijok 6mo agoASML are not the chokepoint for chips. Zeiss are. ASML can hire more engineers and build more machines. Zeiss cannot hire more mirror grinders. And noone wants to train as one.
- cenamus 6mo agoIs it all still manual?
- sfn42 6mo agoUnless the pay is crap I'm sure lots of people would be interested.
- mitthrowaway2 6mo agoWhat is preventing Zeiss from paying higher salaries to mirror grinders, so that young people consider that career over alternatives?
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- Levanta 6mo agoBig idea → good for thoughtful comment
- quanto 6mo agoI have an interesting discussion with a senior colleague: why ASML? why are they by far the best? Their competitors are a few generations behind. The colleague claimed that there is no special magic. It's not that ASML is using some otherwise unknown laws of physics nor is any single step or component particularly special or novel. It's just that they meticulously optimized each step, and the sum of such steps is the winning solution. In fact, this is probably why it's so hard to copy ASML. If there was a single magic component, a single or few engineers could be poached away to a competitor to copy it. However, copying a well-optimized company with many simultaneous optima is a much harder task. Our discussion was in the context of why our quant hedgefund competitor was performing so well, far above the market norm. By nature and design, quant finance is an incredibly efficient field (and most techniques are more or less known by veterans), and we had thought unlikely that one fund could do so much better. Our conclusion was that this fund must be the well-optimized ASML of our field. My colleague happened to know the founder and indeed that was his personal impression as well.
- tim333 6mo agoASLM have put massive financial investment into getting where they are including raising money from customers like Intel in return for shares. Also, form wikipedia "employs more than 42,000 people.. and relies on a network of nearly 5,000 tier 1 suppliers". It's going to be a lot of time and money to match that.
- random3 6mo agoVeritasium has a nice video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0 Obviously, there are a lot of reasons why. But it boils down to having the vision, the belief and the strength to follow through over many years. It's important to not confound vision with random Kool-Aid. Instead it's grounded in research. That research is itself grounded in a strong vision and belief — it got laughed by the entire physics community at the time: > 'people seemed unwilling to believe bending x-rays, and they tended to that we had actually made an image by regard the whole thing as a big fish story Now contrast this with the current academic reality — "publish or perish" and the reality of venture financing and corporate culture that "depends" (arguably in self-inflicted manner, that's not 100% the case) on quarterly repots. ASML is just a recent story, but if you look back, you'll see that most revolutions have a similar pattern of people crazy enough to deviate from the herd. The rest— the immense financial risk, the 5000 suppliers, etc. came as a result of having the ability to see through all the noise and the grit to to follow through when everyone calls you an idiot for not doing something "useful"
- krunck 6mo ago"Seeing ASML’s machinery exhibited at IMEC was what led TSMC to partner with ASML in EUV development. " This industry sure likes it's acronyms.
- Melatonic 6mo agoIntel is using ASML machines now right ? How far behind is their in house tech really and do they still research it?
- the-alchemist 6mo agoThere's some really good analysis (both business and tech) from the Asianometry youtube channel (ignore the name of the channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmgkV83OhHA&list=PLKtxx9TnH76R3D0aXnw-IVVaA383XTfMv&index=13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmgkV83OhHA&list=PLKtxx9TnH7...
- ag8 6mo agoI find this paragraph to be odd: "Wavelengths as low as 13.5 nanometers can achieve more precise patterns in a single exposure. In fact, extreme ultraviolet lithography can combine three or four photolithography patterning cycles into a single one on a seven-nanometer node. Without EUV, producing five-nanometer nodes might require as many as one hundred different steps." But a five-nanometer node has a gate pitch of 45nm and a metal pitch of 20nm! Using different forms of the word "nanometer" in the same paragraph is very confusing...
- MarleTangible 6mo agoI agree, for anyone who's not familiar with it, one is a marketing term while the other is the actual measurement.