[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

[seper8]

Again, you have to manufacture and assemble all the components for the machine to work.

The reason only one company in the world can do it is not because it is easy. If it where easy other companies would be able to imitate it, but they cant. This is why ASML has a profit margin of 50%. This is why companies order these machines years in advance.

There are and have been many companies that have built airplanes. There is one company and one alone that can build these machines. I happen to work at said company and it is a long time ago that I have seen someone so confidently wrong on the internet.

[nwiswell]

> Again, you have to manufacture and assemble all the components for the machine to work.

And, yet again: that is not the hard part.

The reason why ASML is the only company which sells EUV tools is because it is the only company which spent the tens of billions of dollars on developing the technology, not because it has magical manufacturing methods! There are many companies that build WFE tools. Nikon sells ArF excimer immersion litho tools, the manufacturing of which is similarly difficult. The thing that distinguishes EUV is the light source, the optical path, the non-transmissive optics, etc, and the difficulty of resolving all of the related technical challenges that introduces (pellicle heating, out of band flare, aberrations, Sn redeposition, resist outgassing, etc). Not the assembly.

If you work at ASML, you should know this. More specifically, you would not try to imply that the actual assembly requires 10nm precision. Are you an intern?