184
Dutch government to ban ASML from servicing installed wafer tools in China
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
184 points (99.5% liked)
Technology
58138 readers
4398 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Clearly behind them there's the USA pushing for that.
Isn't this dangerous, like playing with fire? I don't think that China is going to be "oh no the software license is expire, we give up and close all the factories", rather going to invest billions to find an alternative and make ASML irrelevant in the country. It won't be fast to see cloned machines but isn't it better to keep them tied to licenses and expensive periodic maintenance instead of pushing a temporary roadblock that will lead to the development of workarounds, unofficial cheap maintenance routines and cloned machines?
I don't think you understand the mountain of technology advancement that those machines need in order to keep operating. I won't elaborate since there's so much on this topic already on the interwebs. Needless to say. The machines can only operate for a few weeks at a time and often require maintenance at that time. So turn off the maintenance and the machines stop working altogether.
China reverse engineering EVERYTHING if you think they can't, you clearly don't see previous history, they aren't fast but they WILL do it eventually, if there's enough motivation (sanctions or/and profit)
They are probably the most complex machines ever created by humanity though, and requires expertise across the whole world to build. Even if they had blueprints, it would take years just to get the manufacturing right.
Yup exactly. The machine's serviceable parts need very specific and complicated techniques to produce. Whatever you think China can conjure together, they're gonna be dancing for around the same amount of time it took the US, Germany and the Netherlands to produce. So about a decade. Sure they got most of the machine already if I understand correctly, but that's like giving a broken iPad to a monkey. And don't feel bad if you're Chinese, it would be the same if any other group of people tried to make it.
And this is why they've been beating every hurdle the west has put up against them. Keep equating people to monkeys and wait for them to shit you on the face. Fuck the CCP, but there are probably more people than US, Germany and the Netherlands combined working specifically in chip manufacturing in China.
If you only ever think there's just one solution to a problem and everyone else are monkeys scratching their ass. You give them more reasons to beat the odds.
Keep it up though.
Tech has gotten cheaper since China got into the race and the whining on the other side has only made it more enjoyable.
Well it doesn't matter what I think. I'm not talking from the point of view of arrogance here.
In theory, it's a simple thing, you get one of various fancy metals like mercury or tin to get energized, and it will emit EUV. Can't do it cold, that wouldn't work. You can also just do a discharge between electrodes at very high voltage or current and it will also generate EUV. But that's not the only requirement. You also must make it from a point-like source somehow.
There are lots of ways to heat an atom but only few where that atom will emit EUV. And everything absorbs EUV strongly so can you make a laser? Nope. In a laser, the photons must remain alive enough to accumulate in the resonator and output when there are enough bounces. Each bounce out of thousands or millions will just absorb the photon. So that's not the way. And you'll have to think your way thru the problem like that until you manage to imagine a way that might actually work. Then you prototype it, test it, fail it, a thousand times. That takes years and billions of dollars. So my opinion is that it will take anyone a decade or more to reach just prototype phase. And it will take another 10 to have something viable. But I don't want to argue so I'm just going to block you 😆😂.
The whole problem is that every piece of technology China gets is immediately used by the CCP to enslave them better, it's why they revolutionized omni-surveillance, tracking and biometrics, and their first and strongest application for AI was monitoring their population for anything they consider threatening to their control (ie freedom).
It's why everyone hates China and wants to see them fail horribly, but don't hate India in the same way as they're nominally democratic.
Don't support genocidal fascists and cry like they're the underdog, nobody in history killed more Chinese than the CCP, not even Genghis Khan.
I said that aren't fast, but they get job done, why do you think there are so many Chinese engineers working around the globe? They get rehired for very good money by Chinese companies when they get enough expertise, Chinese companies headhunt too
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
Correct, its what happened with the chips. And inshallah, the US will sanction itself into isolation.
inshallah brother