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Dutch government to ban ASML from servicing installed wafer tools in China
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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While they likely do have the capability of doing that eventually, there are only two places in the world that have the capability of doing the super small nm scale chips: Netherlands and Taiwan. These machines are insanely complicated and precise. I wouldn't be surprised if China was a decade or more away from doing it themselves. I could be wrong, but this scale of chips is an entirely different monster.
Now, they could be closer, but this particular job isn't that simple.
No, there's only one company in the world that can make these machines: ASML in the Netherlands. TSMC, Intel, Samsung, and everyone else buy their machines from ASML, who has a monopoly on the EUV machines necessary for modern semiconductor nodes.
These machines emit UV at the precise wavelengths necessary by very precisely generating droplets of tin, to be blasted by high powered lasers to create a highly charged plasma that emits UV, then precisely arranged reflectors to focus those beams onto silicon wafers through a mask. Even things like small changes in humidity and air pressure throw off the calibration, so the clean rooms are engineered to keep that constant no matter what the outdoor weather is, and any fab has ultra sensitive seismic detectors to anticipate seismic activity that might affect yields, and the systems have to account for the vibrations generated by human footsteps, fans and other equipment, etc.
The level of precision necessary for current generation fabs is so far beyond any one company or any one country's capabilities.
Believe it or not the state of Oregon also...intel is getting their second high-na euv from ASML soon
If you asked me to pick a state for that, Oregon would not have been it