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> ASML has a monopoly on this tech A lot of this tech is the result of more than 30 years of research, starting with national labs (DOE funded Sandia, LLNL, etc), then consortiums of Intel, AMD, etc (EUV LLC), in fact, ASML was a member of EUV LLV and specifically, because some of the techniques they're using was originally pioneered by DOE Labs and EUV LLC members, they had to get approval from DOE/EUV AFAIK. Also, the core laser tech, tin droplets, was actually pioneered by Cymer, but they bought Cymer wholesale. So part of the issue is they vertically integrated a lot of the very difficult components of their machine by buying smaller companies. This would be like TSMC buying ASML and preventing other fabs from getting access. It's definitely bad for the market, and EUV is so damn expensive it took 30 years of R&D and a consortium of companies to even get to this point. The competing technologies, using different Lasers, would need enormous funding to get them to work. EUV LLC built a 100-nm EUV prototype almost 20 years ago using a different technique, but gave up on that path. There's also electron beam lithography (EBL) which is maskless AFAIK, but I don't think it ever made it to production either. I guess Intel and other players decided it was better to just own ASML stock. So the world seems stuck with ASML, unless of course, China gets a hold of one of the machines and decides to just clone it and ignore patents. |
but even non scam Chinese initiatives are failing https://techtaiwan.com/20210714/tsinghua-unigroup-bankruptcy...