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Comment by bicolao | Hacker News Reader

At this point, what stops TSMC from jacking up the price on future contracts? Can Samsung do it?

Yes, they should charge Apple 30% of their revenue.

Also, they should insist to change "Made in China, designed in California" into "Made in China, High-tech from Taiwan, rest of the design from California".

If they don't comply, Apple should be thrown out of the FabStore.

> "Made in China, High-tech from Taiwan, rest of the design from California"

Aren't the CPU-making machines actually coming from The Netherlands and TSMC is "just" using them to produce the chips?

The EUV sources are just light sources. Calling them chip making machines is like calling a very expensive stove a Michelin-starred restaurant.

ASML is making more than "just light sources". (indeed the "light source" part of their photolitography machines is something they bought a company from the US for - the entire industry has supply chains spanning the world, so attributing it to countries makes not that much sense IMHO)

Interesting, I stand corrected.

That's like calling boeing a propeller company. ASML builds chip making machines. EUV isn't about light sources. It's about the entire process.

https://www.deingenieur.nl/artikel/first-commercial-asml-euv...

This article references Cymer as the manufacturer of the actual light source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymer

I think of them as Si printers with incredibly precise optics. There is certainly something missing in your analogy.

Yeah, it's like inkjet printer vs a little hose that squirts ink, only more so.

I bet Intel would use them for their 5nm process if they knew how.

Usually I don't care much about humor on HN, but you owe me a new keyboard.

Why?

Coffee spilled on the keyboard because of sudden laughter would be my guess.

Deplatforming is in fashion.

I want this so much.

>Also, they should insist to change "Made in China, designed in California" into "Made in China, High-tech from Taiwan, rest of the design from California".

Cambridge, England (Arm) should also be in this mix.

The cores are in-house apple, so that's a bit strenuous

Strenuous? Not in the slightest. The ISA and the original chip design is from Arm and is licensed to Apple. There would be no M1 without Cambridge.

Its so incestuous that all this becomes circular after awhile- there would be no ARM without Apple.

It does seem like TSMC has strong leverage since it would take Apple a lot of time and work to move to a competitor.

On the other hand, the incentives seem pretty well aligned. TSMC presumably makes a lot of money when Apple is successful and sells a lot of chips. Having a customer that is demanding and willing to pay for huge volumes of bleeding edge parts helps TSMC build on their lead. Having early access to the best process helps Apple differentiate, and their business model gives them the margins to afford all of this.

Anyway, I don't see why either side would want to really change this setup.

They can do it for a time. Apple can then use some of the hundreds of billions they have on hand to prop up one of TSMC's competitors, as they did with the RAM suppliers.

Who, Samsung? Somehow I don't see Apple doing that. It's not a particularly populous industry; no other foundry (ignoring the blacklisted Chinese companies) but Samsung, TSMC, and Intel is involved in sub-10nm lithography, to my knowledge.

True, but hundreds of billions can get you a lot, when your main business is affected.

Intel would probably be keen.

I would love to see Intel buy Intel's fabs, glofo or something.

ASML potentially has an even bigger hold on things as they supply TSMC, Samsung, and Intel with the EUV mirror optics.

Zeiss is making the optics, ASML is making the integrated EUV machine.

And just to be clear the optics are not at all trivial when you're talking about EUV and the precisions required

I'm not sure if the lenses are even transparent in the visible range but I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't.

Lenses aren't available for EUV, they can only use quite lossy mirrors.

Weirdly enough, ASML has more than 80% market share even though Canon and Nikon also make DUV equipment.

Do these guys also need to invest a lot on research for new node processes, or is that just on fabs like TSMC, Intel...?

Yes. You can see this just from the size of the machines, which get much larger with every die shrink.

Ah, I though ASML are the mirrors. So they make essentially the light source?

Cymer makes the light source. Now it is owned by ASML.

Japanese are quite behind in the race, with only <100W source being demonstrated.

ASML sells the complete EUV lithography machine. Zeiss is one of their partners that supplies the optics. Trumpf makes the pulsed lasers which turn tin droplets into plasma which then produces the EUV light. They say they have many more research and supply partners, but those are the ones that I've found mentioned by name in press releases.

Do they design the actual tin droplet plasma chamber thing, or are they essentially a systems integrator from a bunch of suppliers putting it all together into their overall design to their specs?

This question doesn't make sense, both options involve designing the thing.

Anyway, it's not even about designing it. The technology had to be invented first. It would be crazy to use exploding metal drops in a vacuum chamber where you want to manufacture microchips if there were any other options but there were zero options before. There are few applications of EUV in general, and currently only one at those luminosity levels. So R&D is a big component here, not just manufacturing. And even if we only look at the manufacturing part, this isn't some "simple" vacuum chamber gadget either, only ~30 machines were built last year and they cost more than 100M$ each. For comparison, four of these cost as much as one Wendelstein-7X. This is more of a big, barely productized science project shipped out as soon as it works just good enough for the chip manufacturers.

It could be some module within the vacuum chamber that has other uses and was already made by someone else for e.g. scientific experiment uses or something; I'm just asking if that part is made in house or is from another supplier.

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