As an ASML US employee, I’ve heard a lot of the internal lore/history about SVG and its predecessor Perkin-Elmer, but it’s interesting to hear more about why Nikon and Canon missed out.
I of course can’t talk about anything confidential, but just to speak in broad strokes, most of the last 20 years of EUV work has been in the reliability space. When I was hired a while back, ASML’s public communications were heavily focused on proving to the customers that we were finally achieving various milestones related to EUV process profitability. Basically, machine uptime was just crossing that threshold barely within the last ten years, for the simple reason that it is insanely difficult.
This is why in my personal opinion I’m skeptical of the scare stories out there warning of Chinese reverse engineering of EUV tech. This is one of the most difficult industrial learning curves that exists. China has a lot of things going for it, but “magic” isn’t one of them.
You write that in 1996 "Congress" voted to defund EUV research - and I had to look it up. ASML should thank the Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich for the assist.
We seem to be forgetting the unsung heroes who helped realize moore’s law: (from the book: “island tinkerers: innovation and transformation in the making of Taiwan’s computing industry” by Honghong Tinn) pg. 189 “I argue that Taiwanese electronics factory women enabled the miniaturization of electronics and mass production of them, in the late 1960s and 1970s. Their assembly of electronics contributed to the realization of moore’s law and made possible offshore production of highly sophisticated electronics for multinational corporations.”
As an ASML US employee, I’ve heard a lot of the internal lore/history about SVG and its predecessor Perkin-Elmer, but it’s interesting to hear more about why Nikon and Canon missed out.
I of course can’t talk about anything confidential, but just to speak in broad strokes, most of the last 20 years of EUV work has been in the reliability space. When I was hired a while back, ASML’s public communications were heavily focused on proving to the customers that we were finally achieving various milestones related to EUV process profitability. Basically, machine uptime was just crossing that threshold barely within the last ten years, for the simple reason that it is insanely difficult.
This is why in my personal opinion I’m skeptical of the scare stories out there warning of Chinese reverse engineering of EUV tech. This is one of the most difficult industrial learning curves that exists. China has a lot of things going for it, but “magic” isn’t one of them.
You write that in 1996 "Congress" voted to defund EUV research - and I had to look it up. ASML should thank the Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich for the assist.
We seem to be forgetting the unsung heroes who helped realize moore’s law: (from the book: “island tinkerers: innovation and transformation in the making of Taiwan’s computing industry” by Honghong Tinn) pg. 189 “I argue that Taiwanese electronics factory women enabled the miniaturization of electronics and mass production of them, in the late 1960s and 1970s. Their assembly of electronics contributed to the realization of moore’s law and made possible offshore production of highly sophisticated electronics for multinational corporations.”
It took me a second to realize this wasn't about Europa Universalis 5.
lol same here