[maxalbarello]

i find it hard to believe that there is no equivalent anywhere else in the world. there is so much talent out there and the stakes are so high that it seems like an inevitability.

whatever many secrets are involved, information wants to be free and it's hard to believe that others won't figure it out.

by the time they do catch up we better be steps ahead. what's after EUV?

[IAmBroom]

I worked on part of it in 2006-8. I noticed that our office waste wasn't being shredded, and asked my boss why not...

"With all the problems we have getting this to work? We ought to ship our drawings to our competitors to slow them down!"

Very tongue-in-cheek, but... yeah. The entire machine underwent a massive overhaul when it was discovered that bare, unoxidized titanium in the presence of elemental hydrogen would absorb so much it became brittle. Who knew? Maybe some few chemists, but none worked in ASML design, as it happened.

[Someone]

High-NA EUV, apparently. https://www.reuters.com/business/asml-says-next-gen-euv-tool...:

- ASML's High-NA EUV machines ready for high-volume production

- Machines have processed 500,000 wafers, showing technical readiness

- Full integration into manufacturing expected in 2-3 years, ASML's CTO says

After that, it may be X-rays.

A disruptive step would be to move to 3D printing, but that (among other issues) is too slow at the moment. Maybe, ideas from nano robotics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanorobotics) can help there.

[q3k]

> A disruptive step would be to move to 3D printing

The lithography equivalents of that are laser direct write lithography and e-beam lithography. They've been used for decades in research labs, but they're impossibly slow for any mass production.

Atomic Semi are trying to make some derivative of these processes happen at a commercial scale.

[mytailorisrich]

Nvidia's latest Rubin architecture has 336 billion transistors, and there are ~10 per wafer.

Even leaving size aside, I don't think that there are any credible way to 3D print something that complex.

Lithography enables that level of complexity because each layer is done in one go. I think any alternative technologies would have that property, too.

[throw0101c]

> i find it hard to believe that there is no equivalent anywhere else in the world. there is so much talent out there and the stakes are so high that it seems like an inevitability.

Well, even jet engine manufacturing is something that China is behind in (relatively speaking), and it (seems?) is simpler than some of the stuff in EUV machines.

[nicoburns]

> and it (seems?) is simpler than some of the stuff in EUV machines.

It probably is. But it's probably in the same category of being one of the most difficult things to manufacture.

[maxalbarello]

yeah but maybe there the stakes are not as high. although i guess it touches the military and so it might be

[throw0101c]

The stakes may not be considered as high for jet engines, but the problems may also be (relatively) easier too.

[sbarre]

Honestly I thought the same, but after watching a couple of videos on how EUV actually works, and what ASML (and the 1,200 other specialized companies that feed into its supply chain) built..

I can understand why you can't just take one apart and copy it.

There's (apparently) 4 decades of accumulated cutting edge scientific research that has gone into these machines.

I suspect the machinery, process and human expertise required to simply produce the parts required for these machines is the real moat (oh and I guess the US-led export controls too).

The build tolerances for components are incredible. There are 11 primary mirrors in an EUV machine, each one has something like 100 coats of ultra-pure materials that are precisely deposited in picometer-thick layers with tolerances in the nanometers, across a 1-meter wide curved surface.

Then you have to position the mirrors perfectly inside the machine, again with tolerances in the nanometers.

So even if you know what you need to do, having the equipment and expertise to do it is a different thing.

And that's just one part of the 100,000+ parts that make up an EUV machine.

[nextaccountic]

Maybe copying it is too fragile (but I note that China copied the F-35)

But in this case the Chinese will just develop their own alternative, that might work as good or even better

[sfn42]

Hasn't happened yet.

[anarticle]

That's the edge of what's possible, it's quite common even for researchers to have problems replicating results at the edge.

There's sometime implicit knowledge in a technique that either doesn't get written down, or someone is so good at something you don't think certain details will matter.

In my old lab (biochemistry) some people just have good hands and are really good at making something repeatable, others not so much.