[doikor]

> Some parts seem oddly manual and others interestingly esoteric.

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.

[rjzzleep]

Maybe, but then again the demand is far higher than what they can deliver and their solution is to hire thousands more people. While that’s a simple scaling mechanism they were limited by Covid restrictions and will probably be limited by the worsening energy crisis

[doikor]

Even if they 10x their production you are talking about 200 of the same machine max per year. Nowhere near the numbers where proper industrial automation would make much sense.

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)

[jve]

All these numbers remind me how people looked at rocketry pre-SpaceX. "Oh, the most complex, expensive, etc thing in the world" (Rightly so)

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... :)

[doikor]

Lithography equipment isn't some government funded cost+ industry with 0 innovation or competition like what SpaceX had (has?) as its competition. Nobody is using equipment from 70s (Soyuz) or even early 2000s (Atlas or Delta).

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.

[bradknowles]

I worked at ASML for several months in the early 2000s. One of the most surprising things to me was the very long tail they had for old equipment in the field that was still being actively used, and therefore had to be actively supported. Like, stuff that was ten or even twenty years old. I seriously doubt that this situation has materially changed.

[himlion]

They are also very much limited by the housing crisis in the Netherlands. They are perpetually looking for places to house their employees.

[rjzzleep]

baybal2 you seem to be shadow banned.

[baybal2]

The bottleneck is not TSMC, but Zeiss which makes the mirrors "more perfect than that of space telescopes"

The yield on those mirrors is very small. They throw away 19 out of 20 mirrors.