[nwiswell]

Yes, the design of those proprietary parts is very technical, but the manufacturing not so much. That's part of what makes the IP situation so tenuous and is a big part of why the FBI has aggressively prosecuted individuals for corporate espionage against WFE firms in the past.

[cactusplant7374]

The tolerances are very tight. Manufacturing must be difficult.

[bradknowles]

I worked a six month contract at ASML years ago. One of the most fascinating things was touring around the spaces with an experienced team leader, who explained a lot of their processes. Note that the below comes from my experience there prior to 2006. Nothing that I'm going to explain here is company proprietary information. Even if I had that, I wouldn't expose it.

Each top machine costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build. They are built by a dedicated team of people who only work on that one machine, and they take it from soup to nuts, including the installation in the field. They spend months taking measurements at the site before they ever start building the machine in the first place. Their placement of the machine and the measurements is very precise -- if the machine has to be moved by a centimeter in any direction from the original measurements taken, they have to basically start over from scratch.

The machine is completely built in clean room facilities at the HQ in Eindhoven, taken all the way to the point where it is used to do good size batches of test runs of known chip designs. Those clean rooms operate way beyond the cleanliness levels of a normal chip lithography clean room. They are some of the cleanest clean rooms in the world.

Once completed, the machine gets completely disassembled and shipped to the customer, along with the team who built it. Then they rebuild it on site. Once rebuilt, it will take months of running in and tweaking before it's able to be considered fully operational. That process alone can take over a year, if the team runs into more problems than typical.

The machines are so sensitive that a truck driving down the road ten miles away can affect the output and may cause the machine to be knocked out of calibration.

From the time of placing the order to the time when the machine is considered fully operational, multiple years have passed.

And that was way back before 2006, when my wife and I moved back here to the US. I had seen the door behind which all EUV design was done, but I never got a chance to see inside. It was locked up like Cheyenne Mountain. And yes, I did previously have a TOP SECRET/SCI clearance, and I've been briefed on exactly what the ANMCC and Cheyenne Mountain look like.

I have no idea how much more complex and sensitive the processes used by ASML have gotten since. I do believe the top machines now cost over a billion dollars, each.

[nwiswell]

> I do believe the top machines now cost over a billion dollars, each.

This isn't accurate, the top end is no more than $200M (and large customers will negotiate down from there).

> The machines are so sensitive that a truck driving down the road ten miles away can affect the output and may cause the machine to be knocked out of calibration.

This is obviously untrue, fabs are busy industrial centers.

The assembly-partial disassembly-reassembly process you laid out is accurate, however, and is the case for all major wafer fabrication equipment.

[seper8]

Wrong again

https://www.reuters.com/technology/ intel-orders-asml-machine-still-drawing-board-chipmakers-look-an-edge-2022-01-19/

[nwiswell]

That is a development system. The purchase prices of the actual manufacturing systems are never disclosed, since the negotiated price differs between customers.

In any event the HVM systems will cost significantly less. This similar article says $150M, as I claimed, and again the actual customer price would be less:

https://content.techgig.com/technology/intel-to-get-chipmaki...

> ASML's most advanced machines in current commercial production, known as EUV lithography systems because of the "Extreme Ultraviolet" light waves they use to map out the circuitry of computer chips, are as big as a bus and cost around $150 million each.

[seper8]

How are you so confidently wrong so often?

Wonder if you have ever heard of ASML before reading this news article. Just stop it.

[nwiswell]

Not really any harder than making an airplane.

For older generations of tools, there are a lot of bootleg replacement parts floating around on secondary markets. When tools reach their end of life at leading-edge fabs, or when those fabs are shuttered, the tools are often sold off to trailing edge fabs in permissive jurisdictions with shoestring budgets.

These fabs are not averse to buying whatever works cheapest, and the OEM WFE companies don't really have any way to enforce IP.

[seper8]

>Not really any harder than making an airplane. Except the airplane still works if something is misaligned by 10NM...

[nwiswell]

That's adjusted dynamically during operation by interferometer controls, not in manufacturing. You'd get more than 10nm of misalignment just due to a couple degrees of temperature change.

[seper8]

And that dynamical adjustment is very easy too ofcourse! Just move it x nm in the right direction!

[nwiswell]

In fact it is quite easy! This is a solved problem, the stage is moved those minute distances using piezoelectric actuators.

Moving hundreds of microns accurately is actually a harder problem, since that requires traditional lead-screw style stages.

The two strategies are used together to create a stage that can move macroscopic distances quickly (e.g., die to die), but also make minute adjustments quickly to ensure alignment is maintained.

But, again, this has nothing to do with manufacturing