At least there is a lesson for society here about how to keep people together instead of dividing them. I'm both fascinated by the company, and like others in the company drawn by the technology, but also wonder if I would have a problem working in this cult like setting.
They don't really make that many machine for heavy automation to make much sense.
By the end of 2021 they had made ~140 EUV machines in total with commercial production starting in 2011. So if you average it out they make ~15 per year. Though the production rate has most likely ramped up over the years so most of those have been built closer to today then 2011.
And in those ~140 EUV machines there is many different versions with improvements. So you would have had to redo your automation lines multiple times over the process of building them.
In total they make around 300 machines per year at the moment but only a fraction of them are the highest end ones.
The yield on those mirrors is very small. They throw away 19 out of 20 mirrors.
Why? Because their machines are incredibly sensitive... and equally expensive. And your customers get angry if the machine doesn't work reliably - and rightly so.
I don't know if they do that still, and it likely was somewhat hyperbole, but the core of it is actually correct: the machine is indeed that sensitive, and is indeed that expensive. Every second of lost operation is expensive, and creating a fab around one of them is not quite as straightforward as just pouring some concrete somewhere and adding walls and a roof.
(and similarly, the nearby ILL Synchotron [2] had issues that were eventually tracked to trucks passing on its nearby highway)
[1] https://goo.gl/maps/jNESRpcdMkAtVURM9
[2] https://goo.gl/maps/4oXRXw6pxkxMFCUt5 Note that the satellite view is blurred because that whole area technically belongs to the french CEA, their Nuclear Administration!
I was surprised to agree with most of what ASML bosses said, and I would have given exactly the same answer than the assembly operator, namely not providing any timeline... because it is complete garbage to do so on so much complex machines, not to mention the machine is a prototype, then the first one. I may have answered "yesterday".
But noway they will make me use a doz computer, or an android phone...
I am _seriously_ curious on how they want to get their pitch below 7nm with a 13.6nm EUV light. Do they plan to go massive multi-patterning with sub-nm xray positioning? For below 7nm pitch, what would they use: xray light? electron/ion beams? pattern printing? And what about the purity of the wafer dopped silicon for smaller features? xray light: what materials to use?? Quantum interference tricks?
I wonder how many silicon atoms from a wafer crystal we have on a 1nm row...
All that is to get chips which consume less energy, get faster telecom, play magnificient games, store more in flash ram.
they've overdone it. by this point they have made it way to fucking difficult for people to truly come to grips with the complexity of modern life mostly becuase in their zealous protection of 'technical knowledge' they've made a life such as my own impossible to realize (this in turn, stunts the advancement and development of ways to cope with the consequences of modernity and high-technology in the culture at large, becuase people cannot learn to undesrtand enough that they can figure it out; they move us to a scenario in which only their own chosen selected few are in a position from which something could be done; but they select for obedience and dullness; not for spark)
Maybe my reasoning is leaping a lot; but as I see things, this attitude towards knowledge and understanding is the cause of the now troubling distrust in the academic-scientific apparatus by a largely ignorant public (an ignorance which is somebody's profit).
this attitude has stunted my own personal pursuit of happiness. that I cannot easily come to understand their 'propietary' techniques (higher-order logical systems, advanced litography, etc) that they use to do what they do is just frustrating.
I'll end by adding that there are many more instances of this attitude around knowledge in other subjects I've studied... even some which are no longer considered 'sacred' (in more 'developed' countries) but which were still making people act all mysterious and in awe of 'the knowledge' in my own famously ignorant native country.
I do not know what minimum pitches are planned for the future so-called "2 nm" CMOS processes, but it is likely that they would not be smaller than 15 to 20 nm.
So there will be some time until multiple patterning could be needed again, and by that time there are chances that the transistors will have minimum sizes determined by other causes than lithography, so for further progress a switch to different semiconductor materials will be needed, not a further improvement of lithography.
I have heard about "the 2 times lazered tin droplet to generate "enough" EUV light" already in an older ASML documentary (years ago).
In other words: photomask madness.
Photomask manufacturing is another critical part of silicium chip manufacturing. It seems EUV photomask are special (no more transparent crystals, but instead reflective "patterned" surfaces?), wonder if they are still using electron/ion beams to engrave patterns.
Wonder where are manufactured EUV photomasks, heard about Japan a lot.
Oh, and I realised that I am really curious on how they keep the EUV mirrors clean from the tin droplets :) Wild guess: EUV mirrors far away, H2 gas reaction, etc?).
Talk to a random ASML engineer at a party and they’ll enthusiastically tell you everything about what they’re working on.
Tacit knowledge is hard to pass down in written form because a reader would be overwhelmed by details. It is easier to pass down over video, but video loses information about smell, vibration, static charge, etc. that the human body can feel and learn from.
Can you explain why you used the word construct here?
I should also say that it's only due to the internet (and its novel aggregation-theory dynamics) that these old attitudes I am ranting against become truly noxious.
Also who would be buying these machines if they 10x their production? They go into fabs that costs 10 to 20 billion to build. Let’s say you put 10 of them in each fab. It would still require 150 billion in fab investments every year. There is demand but not that much demand (or capacity to build the fabs)
And then they come in to commoditize the market, make it accessible for lower players by aggressively trying to bring down cost-per-unit via simplicity and process automation.
Not saying it could apply to ASML, but I wonder... :)
It is actually the opposite. Everything is really expensive because you have to be constantly making the newest/greatest thing. A 5 year old lithography machine is pretty much useless for manufacturing high end chips (there is its own market for their output but phones and computers are not it)
Basically if you tried to do the SpaceX way of making a "good enough" rocket (Falcon 9) and use it for a decade+ you would be bankrupt very fast. Nobody wants to pay top dollar for old tech.
edit:
> aggressively trying to bring down cost-per-unit
And what makes you think ASML is not trying to do that? Every cent they save on cost-per-unit increases their profit margin.
Then the litographer does not seem to be the limiting equipment anymore. I guess there is heavy R&D going into electrostatic transistor design and crystals to deal with the gate current below 20nm.
I wonder at which size, silicium doping does not work "enough" anymore.
You can go below 20 nm, but you get this constant tunneling current, which deteriorates your on/off ratio, and increases power consumption (and TDP). It's doable if you can turn that part of the die off (dark silicon).
In the silicon crystal lattice, without considering "doping", the atomic valence lenght is 2.35 angstrom or 0.254 nm, and unit lenght 5.44 angstrom or 0.544 nm.
So a feature of 7nm is hardly 14 silicon crystal lattice units. With doping, I wonder if it will be ever required to have a better pitch to have something to work with silicon, unless near "atomic perfect" doping in near "atomic perfect" silicon crystals can still be used for on/off gates.
It makes me pessimistic on the amount of remaining transistor shrink steps. "2nm" maybe "1nm" then you would need to assemble atom per atom perfect lattices frozen in time.