This is clearly a significant achievement, but does anyone with semiconductor experience have a sense of how far "generates EUV light" is from "production-ready tool"?
As I ironically said in another comment, all you need is a retired Chinese ex employee at Zeiss.
Nothing can stay private or secret forever, and they have the money and people to achieve that. Even if it takes them another 5 years to reach what we have today.
This isn't a moat ASML can keep for long though. There can be alternatove technologies to achieve the same goal. So far only China has that incentive. The real problem is process scaling is slowing down. How many more generations of lithography machines will ASML design? Probably not many. This means there will be no edge left in 5 or 10 years, as eventually brute force will work and China will achieve the same lithography resolution.
Till that point, they are just going all in with cheap coal + solar, so even if they use older machines and run longer exposure times, even if they achieve lower yields and toss away a lot of the dies, they are still economically competitive. At the end cheap enery solves a lot of the issues.
The US is close to having that incentive, if the rift between the US and Europe keeps widening. The Netherlands has one lever, but damn it's a long one.
Right now their chips are already "economically" competitive, as in SMIC is starving on 20% margins vs ASML/TSMC/NVIDIA getting gluttonous on 50-70%, at least for enterprise AI. Current scarcity pricing = litho costs borderline rounding error, 1500 Nvidia chip flips for 30000, 6000 huawei chip flips for 20000. The problem is really # of tools access and throughput. They can only bring in so many expensive ASML machines, including smuggling, which caps how much wafers they can afford to toss at low yield. They figure out domestic DUV to 2000 series and throughput is solved.
Hence IMO people sleeping on Huawei 9030 on 5nm DUV SAQP, still using ASML DUV for high overlay requirement processes, domestic DUV to fill rest. But once they figure out SAQP overlay, which will come before EUV, they're "set". For cost a 300m-400m ASML EUV, PRC can brrrt tools at BOM / cost plus margin. Think 40 domestic DUVs and associated infra for price of one ASML EUV to run 8x lines with 30% yield and still build 2x more chips normalized for compute that they can run on cheap local energy to match operating costs. Then they have export shenanigans like bundle 5nm chips with renewable energy projects and all of sudden PRC data center + energy combo deals might be globally competitive with 3/2nm. Deal with our shitter chips for now, once they deprecate we give you something better when our processes narrows gap, and you have bonus power to boot because some jurisdictions, building grid is harder than building fabs.
How do longer exposure times and older machines enable 2nm process nodes?
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ch...
FWIW, this seems to be a Reuters report reprinted in Japan Times. Previous HN discussions got just a couple comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307819
I don't have that many kidneys left to buy gpus, ram and ssd at the prices they are now, let alone the prices next year.
If you hate invasions so much, you should probably focus your energies on Venezuela. Looks like Trump might start a war for Christmas.
I think it's more like smearing/projection, like Republican conspiracy theories about Democrats being pedophiles. Guess where the real pedophiles were hanging out the whole time.
EDIT: Given the dramatic downvotes, I repent: China will use these EUV machines to build AI sharks with lasers that will swim towards Taiwan! Is this better?
You overestimate length of the western outrage.
Anyway what's to sanction? Almost no country recognizes Taiwan. Diplomatically they changed one job in China to another
> Their recruitment was part of an aggressive drive China launched in 2019 for semiconductor experts working abroad, offering signing bonuses that started at 3 million yuan to 5 million yuan ($420,000 to $700,000) and home-purchase subsidies, according to a review of government policy documents.
I guess they won't leave China anyways. So what's to sanction...
The team includes recently retired, Chinese-born former ASML engineers and scientists — prime recruitment targets because they possess sensitive technical knowledge but face fewer professional constraints after leaving the company, the people said.
Once inside, he recognized other former ASML colleagues who were also working under aliases and was instructed to use their fake names at work to maintain secrecy, the person said.While I am sure that the vast majority of them are just regular people, I'm also pretty sure there are True Believers amongst them whose mission is to go out into the world and enrich themselves with the skills and knowledge to bring back to China and further the CCP's goals. Some of them might even attain citizenship in the country they go to while inwardly retaining full allegiance to the PRC.
Heck, I know people from other, friendly/allied countries who obtain US citizenship who, if you pose the hypothetical question "If your former country and the US got into a shooting war, who would you fight for?", they would pick their former country without hestitation.
And despite public policy and rhetoric sometimes stating how the PRC is becoming a rival or even existential threat to the Liberal Democratic World Order (TM), the Western democracies don't do anything to secure things. And quite frankly, I don't know if there is anything that could be done, short of getting into... highly controversial territory. Which if the situation were reversed, the CCP would probably not bat an eye to do.
I wonder what could be used here, non-compete? IP infringement? Or doing it "for all mankind"?
As for knowledge, the YouTube channel Branch Education explained EUV lithography in great detail, sponsored by ASML itself.
My impression is that the knowledge is not that secretive, the precision required at every step is the key.
Ultimately a lot western innovation run on brain drained PRC talent. There is bamboo ceiling in western tech for east asians, specifically to restrict reverse knowledge transfer. Side effect is once PRC talent hits this ceiling they know big title and fat paychecks and upward mobility is back home, where frankly QoL is off the charts. Ultimately PRC wealthy enough to reverse brain drain aka brain recirculation and PRC talent aren't retarded enough to limit their career aspirations because west decides to cap their career trajectory and try to lock their future behind noncompetes, especially in cold war vs their birth country. Worse, PRC wealthy enough even if there's no bamboo ceiling they can afford to reverse brain drain top 1%, hence current equilibirum. West needs PRC talent, west cannot afford PRC talent to climb too high, PRC can afford to take them off west's hands.
Until west figures out another source of talent, they're stuck in this talent trap. And IMO India ain't it, they don't have the integrated industrial chains and academic structure to produce same kind industrial ready workers yet.
But the science was probably not
I don't think this is classified technology, although asml would like it if they were punished.
And even if it's patented, China has been stealing everything with little consequence
Use of that term is not propaganda, it's normal English.
This seems like the obvious conclusion of an ethnic bloc against a mercenary creedel nation?
Any westerner reading this right now wouldn’t die for their country, it’s almost absurd. It’s like asking them to die for Walmart.
So, now they just need an old retired Chinese that worked for Zeiss and build a prototype for the optical devices they need.
They use armies of graduates just to literally copy, when they could build something new or different.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-might-cut-rtx-50-gpu-suppl...
We will also see talent pipeline erosion.
Just further Western industrial policy failure.
But large organizations like defense are all about distributed trust anyway - even if you could verify the hardware, the guy you order to do it is going to be a whole command chain removed and likely a contractor with a clearance in the civilian world.
Whereas your high level political and military leadership having direct contact with managers and designers in production facilities is extremely valuable.
Remember Snowden.
With their new Radeon/RDNA architecture it took AMD years to overcome their reputation for having shitty drivers on their consumer GPUs (and that reputation was indeed deserved early on). And I bet if you go read GPU discussion online today you'll still find people who avoid AMD because of drivers.
That won't stop them, but it's a big barrier to entry.
Oh and that's just to get the drivers to work. Not including company-specific features that need to be integrated by the game devs into their game codebase, like DLSS / FrameGen and FSR. And in the past there was other Nvidia/AMD-specific stuff like PhysX, hair rendering, etc.
I don't think that it will happen in the next 5 years, but who knows?
Good podcast on him: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/from-swift-to-moj...
This was even proven in practice with Intel’s Arc. While they had (and to some extent still have) their share of driver problems, at a low enough price that isn’t a barrier.
Its that nvidia relentlessly works with game developers to make sure their graphics tricks work with nvidia drivers. Its so obvious you miss it. Look in the nvidia driver updates they always list games that have fixes, performance ect. AMD never (used?) to do this they just gave you the drivers and expected developers to make their game work with it. The same strategy that MS used for their OS back in the 90's.
Thats at least how things got where they are now.
>> Due to Memory Shortages
I don't think Nvidia wants to give up on consumer. They're a gateway into the overall AI ecosystem.
Having feet planted there also make sure they can play the local game when that begins to blow up. Nvidia wants a robotics play, too.
This is a pragmatic choice. And most of the money is in commercial.
You mean, NV is after the money with a heavy heart and a sad tear or two over the abandoned consumers, like "We love you so much but sorry, we must go pragmatic on you"?
> And most of the money is in commercial.
This is a serious systemic failure and it's even wilder that it's accepted without question.
If Nvidia had infinite supply and infinite resources, they would absolutely continue doing consumer. There are constraints that prevent them from doing so at the typical volumes.
Giving up on consumer also means giving up on a gateway to more CUDA ecosystem users.
Does anyone here have leverage to affect strategy?
Good joke. Probably a couple of tech billionaires will eventually say something and then something will happen.
We’re not the good guys here. China isn’t great, but they at least don’t bully the entire world and kill millions of people.
We're not the good guys here, but if you think China's any better then I have a bridge to sell you in Beijing.
Damned if you. Damned if you don't.
Something to think about if considering the purchase of a DJI drone.
also, consider that a $50 smartphone can drive an ICBM.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $500,000 laying around to buy myself a DGX B200 with a TB of HBM and 2TB of system ram, nor the 14.3kW of power to run the thing.
Western semi still "safe" since west+co aren't going to source from PRC leading edge due to national security, but pretty soon they're either going to need to compress margins to compete which means cutting costs, which means cutting R&D because shareholder going to get theirs or western semi business model going to run on permenant subsidies. Which is what will probably happen considering their performance is why stonk lines go up right now. That 1T PRC spend and choose to simply discount for utility chips is going to wipe multipel trillion of western semi market cap and all the economic implications that entails so it might not even be bad idea.
There is a theme in the industries China does well in - western regulators ban cut-throat competition, China competes very hard and wins. The situation at scale is pretty straightforward. Usually it is environmental or labour policy, so this case of the root cause being sanctions is a bit unusual. But, once again, how Nvidia is meant to compete in China when their best products can't be sold there?
Except the market pretty much can't do this with Nvidia. Nobody is showing any sign of catching up: it is entirely possible we are seeing a runaway train and without the intervention of a massive state like China to create a viable competitor, there will never be one.
They did the same thing with the COVID crypto era boom. There really is no honor for these companies and I will be buying the first Chinese made silicone out of absolute spite and anger
If they're cobbling together old parts, it sounds more like something you'd to to keep things running in case a conflict erupts:
> The availability of parts from older ASML machines on secondary markets has allowed China to build a domestic prototype
They might be, but if they plan on getting a factory running in 3 years, they're presumably planning on using what they purchased.
Being how strategic this is, I imagine that the investment won't be entirely laissez faire and there will be lower tolerance for cheating in this endeavor. I think that ultimately they'll do quite well with their efforts.
The hard part, i.e. optics, light source. Zeiss had like 3k engineerings, Cymer 1k, ASML 13k during EUV commercialization process. PRC can (and is) just throwing bodies at problem, lots of parallel execution with clear second mover road map. That and as this article suggest, they're literally poaching people with the tacit knowledge which will help speed run. I'd wadger they get there sooner than later.
Animats•1d ago
nullhole•1d ago
Animats•20h ago