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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>Most competitive chips in the world are produced by machines made in the Netherlands at ASMI/ASML

AFAIK, ASMLs fancy EUV tech comes from a Bay Area company they acquired a while ago and not from the Netherlands.

If you refer to Cymer, they're doing the light source. A critical part of the system certainly, but not the whole. Then mirrors are done by Carl Zeiss in Germany. The blank photomask come mostly from 2 Japanses companies. On such complex systems there's room for many critical providers. Still, the integrated product comes from ASML.

Cymer is the linchpin of ASML's leadership. Other litho machine developers like Canon and Nikon almost dropped out of the industry because they couldn't develop functional EUV light sources. ASML got around that by buying Cymer. And ASML has multiple other R&D labs and offices in the US handling critical technologies like software and robotics

A quick Google search suggests ASML bought Cymer for the patent portfolio, while the tech didn't quite pan out. It seems like Trumpf is the current supplier of the EUV source.

This is most definitely not true. Trumpf makes CO2 lasers which are used by Cymer to produce EUV radiation via excitation of liquid tin droplets.

The light source is by a very wide margin the most difficult and critical component of an EUV tool. The US still dominates wafer fab equipment - Cymer plus Applied Materials, Lam, and KLA. The only major non-US supplier is Tokyo Electron who is also quite strong. ASM International is a good but niche European supplier.

ASML doesn't seem like a niche supplier considering it generates more revenue than all but one of the major suppliers you list.

Applied Materials - 17bn

ASML - 11bn

Tokyo Electron - 10.8 bn

Lam - 9.5 bn

KLA Corp - 4 bn

Cymer (2012, before acqusition) - 600m

ASMI aka ASM International - it’s now a separate company from ASML (formerly ASM Lithography)

Yeah i'm always wonder just because the company is located in the EU, does it mean its actually a EU company? Given US institutional investors who probably have big voting power own majority stake in those tech companies.

I think ASML's connection to NL is solid, you could say it's a Dutch company. The R&D, world headquarters are in NL and board of directors includes many Dutch people, including the CEO.

Do you have a reference? AFAIK it's 2 other German companies that are key in the production of EUV photolitography machines; Zeiss for the lenses and Trumpf for the lasers.

I see reference for a company bought by ASML in California, HMI. They were bought in 2016 but the development of EUV technology predates it by many years so I find it unlikely that it had an important role in it.

Cymer was apprently the first to produce a EUV light source but their lasers were not commercial viable. Trumpf lasers are used in the commercial EUV machines. https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14039015/how-d...

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