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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

Someone did remind us that TSMC relies on dutch machines for wafer productions. It's not china-skills-black-hole as one could think (I used to)

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ASML is currently the only maker of EUV lithography machines in the world. Each machine costs over $200 million.

TSMC, Samsugn, Intel are all relying on ASML.

Well that's okay, they also own parts of ASML.

also, the first T in TSMC stands for Taiwan, which is not China

Not for much longer

Parent is being flippant here, but there's some truth to this. If we get into a Cold War with China (or, worse, a shooting war), China may attempt to forcibly re-unify Taiwan, and they have a pretty good chance of succeeding.

Very true. However there's only a very slim chance that they'd get TSMC out of that. Taiwan has made it pretty clear that they'd rather destroy TSMC than let it fall into PRC hands. Since they don't have nukes, holding a large portion of the global semiconductor supply change hostage is a very large part of the power they wield geopolitically.

ironically, Taiwan falling to the PRC probably makes the US the inheritor of at least down to TSMC's 5nm node. That DoD backed foundry in Arizona then being orphaned would probably mean it either spins off as a US company or goes on the market in some backroom deal.

If you trust the EU to prevent ASML end up in chinese hands, then you're trusting too much.

ASML is already banned by the Netherlands government to deal with China.

ASML also relies on components and engineering from Trumpf for EUV light sources and Zeiss for optics, both German.

And Trumpf reliant on Chinese laser tubes, and Zeiss is reliant on Chinese contractors for a part of lens work they sell. And if somebody think the former is easy to replace, go and search for even a single 10kw tube sold without months long lead times.

TSMC makes wafers themselves, Dutch ASML is in scanner business, not wafer making machines.

I thought asml was manufacturers of EUV machines..

They are called wafer-steppers and they transfer the design onto the wafer.

Actually making the wafer into proper chips is multi-multi-step proces ( like 50 - 100 steps ).

Stepper are not used on high end nodes for more than a decade. I believe anything 130nm, and lower uses a scanner.

I stand corrected, though I believe the term persists.

Dutch please.

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