ASML reports fire at its Berlin factory
reuters.com
reuters.com
We are taught that fabs are not treated as factories but as hazardous chemical storage plants. On top of that, we work with high pressure and high power systems.
Fires have accounted for the most damage to fabs over the years; however, this situation is different.
The site is not a fab, it is a ASML manufacturing plant. This plant does not produce chips. It produces parts for the ASML machines. It makes the tables the wafer moves on and the frame the mask moves on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH6Urfqt_d4
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/mask
Downstream effects of this fire will reduce the uptime of the machines and the delivery of promised machines to our customers.
To plug ASML. Speaking as a new grad. If you are in hardware, physics, nanoscience, simulations. ASML is the best company to work at if you want to learn. I get exposure to maybe the most complex engineering system is the world. The scale, complexity, details, and just hardcore technology is mind-blowing. I am plugging ASML because it is not widely know and I would love if fellow engineers had the opportunity to work here. I absolutely love the work I do.
I have had to learn this lesson the hard way when I assumed that Disney+ was going to flop when a lot of the senior engineering talent supposedly quit during the ramp up. What I didn't realize was that technology isn't as important as other things when you have a moat. Disney+ ended up relatively successful despite their technological hiccups. Same reality with ASML.
Internal software is messy. Testing is also messy. Lots of things need to be automated. End of the day, it’s a bunch of hardware people.
The exciting stuff are the physics simulations. Modeling how lens aberrations affect the light that passes through and how to correct for that.
And how can the risk managers know so much about potential regressions? Are they a panel of former engineers?!
So many questions
It's more like getting custom-made artisanal goods: each machine has a "father/mother" from its 'conception' til delivery who treats it as their (work) baby. Then a special plane will fly the machine and a team of dedicated engineers will spend weeks in your fab doing install / validation. The process is long and complex.
Downtime are really painful and expensive so the philosophy is "better copy paste the code rather than change what's working". downtime are not very frequent but people are just the least expensive / worrying thing there. It's not like you can easily start a competitor...
A company like ASML gives me hope. Do you know by chance if there are similar companies (complex engineering, with physics, maths, chemistry, computer science, ...) that are located in Switzerland ?
I've only worked with their products and not a whole lot with the people but Sensirion [0] is very close to Zürich and is ranked one of the best employers in Switzerland while seemingly being at the intersection of the things it seems you're interested in.
Switzerland is also full of manufacturing equipment suppliers (e.g. Schaublin and GF Machining Solutions, the entire "Watch Valley") and manufacturing is full of intersections between physics/maths/chemistry/software engineering.
Plus there's the pharmaceutical companies.
For a small country, I think Switzerland is about the best place for you to be.
AFAIK, Switzerland is full of such companies. Especially since CERN and many top universities and research institutes are there.
The environment is nice, but the area personally didn't work out for me.
We supply the optics to ASML and also make our own semi equipment directly sold to fabs. Lots of growth and interesting challenges at the cutting edge of physics.
Given that it is the factory acquired from Berlin Glas in 2020, surely its capacity would only "just" be coming online at ASML and they have pre-existing capacity elsewhere ?
Bit of a strange question ?
Competing with ASML in any sort of serious form would need more than just stealing some IP, it would need $$$ measured in the many billions.
ASML does have competitors, Canon and Nikon being the obvious two. But ASML has better technology than them, which is why continues to dominate the market.
ASML's model is not dissimilar to Apple's. Throw money at R&D like nobody's business, make some quality company acquisitions along the way, reap the rewards.
ASML basically have a 100% market share in EUV, 95% market share in ArF tools, 20% in Dry tools.
My limited understanding of the market is that basically ASML will be untouchable until at least the 2030's.
There are about two companies like ASML in the whole world, and there are maybe a dozen consumers of their machines, companies like TSMC or Samsung. ASML is in an effective monopoly position.
It's much like asking if you can open a competing company to build nuclear submarines. Technically you likely can.
That said, it's not impossible; SpaceX came out of left field and within a decade became one of the most prominent space rocket companies, they managed to find rocket scientists and engineers.
Which isn't in any way to take away from the pioneering things that SpaceX engineers have done (and the way they've done them!). But is to say they definitely had help in getting over the "high-capital-investment industry" starting bump.
I once freelanced at a startup that was building a machine that could compete with ASML's 30 year old machines. Those are still being used, resold and refurbished so one of those refurbishing companies (made up of ex ASMLers ofc) thought they could build new ones from scratch.
It worked (after a series of bankruptcies, restarts and acquisitions I might add - it was a rocky ride but not for technical reasons). That doesn't mean they will ever be able to catch up to ASML, or even intend to, but it's clearly possible for ex ASML people plus some young new engineers to build a lithography product. I bet with a few extra years patience you can do without the ex ASML people altogether.
This means that if eg China wants to have their own chip industry, and the US keeps preventing ASML from selling their best machines to China like they currently do, all the Chinese government has to do is encourage a few dozen lithography startups to happen, aimed initially at the low-end of the market. Add some protectionism (eg import tariffs on any chips that could be made by Chinese machines), wait a few decades, and done. I'm pretty sure it'll happen.
What I value is the opportunity to be see technology and scale of this caliber.
The sheer size of the supply chain you need to create to make a working machine is massive. It's one of the reasons why ASML got ahead of the Japanese companies that tried to do everything in-house.[3][4]
It took 17+ years and €6 billion in R&D to get EUV working [5] (as such EUV litography became feasible in the 90s), so ASML's leading position on the market is justified. They have to recoup all the costs, so they will make sure to keep the market leadership through all legal means.
My guess is that if someone would come up with a more efficient EUV plasma generation or better optic systems, ASML would acquire the company and take over the technology.
Regarding the negotiating power, some companies like GlobalFoundries couldn't afford ASML's EUV machines, so they parked their EUV plans [6]. It's only big players like TSMC, Samsung and Intel that can afford this tech and all these companies know their worth and prices. ASML needs money to pay for the R&D and can't afford to lose it's biggest customers that are also buying their non-bleeding edge technologies (DUV litography).
I don't know the business side of things, but it's definitely going to be interesting to see what happens with competition in the EUV litography in the upcoming 10+ years.
EUV litography and silicon-based chips have their physical limits, so there might be other ways to continue improvements.[7]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-asml-holding-xtal-court-i...
[2] https://semiengineering.com/extending-euv-to-2nm-and-beyond/
[3] https://ideas.repec.org/p/eti/dpaper/05007.html
[4] https://youtu.be/SB8qIO6Ti_M?t=673
[5] https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems
[6] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13277/globalfoundries-stops-a...
[7] https://semiengineering.com/making-chips-at-3nm-and-beyond/
My opinions is that this whole comment discussion about creating a competitor is in the wrong direction. It is impossible to recreate and outperform what ASML has.
A better focus would be to tackle problems in the <2nm processes. If someone found a method to stop electron tunneling at smaller nodes, this will net much more revenue and create more value for society.
Some are however, remote friendly in the way that they do offer WFH options, but that means you live around the office/HQ for legal and security reasons and can WFH every now and then, with the agreemant that you have to show up at the office when required, not you get employed form anywhere in the world you happen to reside in and keep working from your living room, that's a no-go from the start for any established company in the semi field.
Also, most of them believe in a culture where shoulder-to-shoulder collaboration is key to development success and innovation, and having worked in the industry I have to agree. When the industry was forced remote kicking and screaming in 2020 "thanks" to Covid, morale and junior onboarding suffered a lot since the whole processes and culture was built on decades of shoulder-to-shoulder work where the only way to learn was, besides the necessary years in academia, to hang around seasoned graybeards and get your hands dirty with them vs self study with Googling the answers on stack overflow, so this process couldn't (management also didn't want to) suddenly uproot it and convert it to fully remote.
Basically, a material scientist, optics engineer or physicist would be at the core of the main money making products (lithography machines) and therefore be way more valued than SW devs which tend to be treated more as cost center in this industry (in general but can't speak for ASML), so if you like being at the core of the product and be treated like a rockstar, then I'd stay in the SW industry and avoid the semi industry all together (I worked 7 years as a dev in semi, before leaving it for good for the SW industry, but the graybeards I worked with in analog design with deep domain knowledge in RF were making bank and were pampered like rockstars, whereas SW and FW devs were treated like replaceable cogs that could be easily offshored without any losses).
Agile in HW only "works" when your company is a sweatshop, operating on low margins, bind by churning out commodity stuff in volume to demanding customers (i.e. Apple) on a strict cadence with the fear that if you don't deliver on time and under budget, then they go somewhere else, so you hire some Agile consultants to act as whip-crakcers and henchmen of management to make sure your devs are busy bees and ship, ship, ship.
I assume this is not the case with ASML (and maybe also with the likes of Nvidia, etc.) as they're the tip of the spear and so far ahead of the competition that they can take their time and charge however much they want and their customers have no other choice but to wait and pay up as there's nobody else to go to for competitive alternatives in the bleeding edge space.
The manifesto is extremely flexible, though (it doesn’t mention standup or fixed-length sprints, for example), so I think it can work for hardware, too, but you likely have to make the sprints longer and be more flexible in lengthening or shortening them to match reality, maybe do more documentation, etc.
I think ”half year sprints” loosely is how the Apollo program was run (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions), certainly after Apollo 1, when they realized the schedule wasn’t the most important thing in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1#Program_recovery: “We were too 'gung-ho' about the schedule and we blocked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we.”
The dogma of Agile with a capital “A”, on the other hand, IMO, doesn’t work for anything, be it software or hardware.
An example I know of is that we use feed forward control to make sure layers are aligned and printed with nanometer precision. Simulations are needed in this instance to model effects like thermal expansion, pressure waves, and much more.
There is also more work in metrology (measurement) with stuff like scanning electron microscopes, lasers, flow, etc.
You can find more about this by looking at the companies ASML has acquired or ASML's job postings.
Many things are still unclear including:
- how big the damage is - how long it takes to operate again - how it was possible to happen/how it happend
The linked article basically says the same.
I assume making those machines is pretty crazy as well.
[edit]
Chronic exposure to small amounts or acute exposure to large amounts of mercury vapor is toxic; it's just that most compounds are worse.
If that was a never-gonna-let-you-go bond, HF would be a much less nasty substance.
On a tangent from that link: “Fluorine is a naturally-occurring, pale yellow-green gas with a sharp odor.” What lunatic went sniffing fluorine gas and how did he have any sense of smell after doing so?
There are some fluorine compounds that are far less reactive than things like HF, but still toxic; perfluorooctanoic acid is the most notorious one. Naturally these are the ones that are most used to synthesize fluorine compounds.
"Piranha solution" (sulfuric acid, water, and hydrogen peroxide) is closer to what tv/movies portray hydrofluoric acid being like. That is, being able to disappear a body in it.
It seems to be dangerous in a lot of different horrible ways. It's always fun reading an MSDS for substances like this: https://www.airgas.com/msds/001077.pdf
I worked at IGNS in NZ and they used it for dissolving rocks. Many warning signs.
[edit: to clarify I mean safety warning signs, not warning signs of being in contact with it. My assumption is excruciating agony which would be a good indicator :D]
I'm not sure what concentration IGNS was using it in as I'm mercifully a computer person, but I had a friend who worked in their labs and took me through them one time :D
> It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals—steel, copper, aluminum, etc.—because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride that protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminum keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
I think there is a reason, there are not that many around. If you would apply the default computer safety mindset to rocket fuels ...
The mound of earth is there to redirect any potential explosion upwards hopefully protecting the rest of your facility if one building goes boom.
Infrastructure is pretty bad (try getting good internet or mobile reception, even as a business), as are labor and tax laws and the motivation of most employees is pretty low as a result (high security, limited mobility - need tenure to retain the security, low impact of actions - both under and over performing), additionally, everything is a bureaucratic nightmare, better get out the fax machine.
On the labour and tax laws side, work life balance is a thing, presenteeism is not. Being comfortable living your actual life is important to people, and while the average person won't get exceptionally wealthy (software developers are well paid, but not exactly millionaires) they will at least enjoy their lives, along with a large portion of the rest of the population.
I can't speak for other people, but career progression is still a thing, aspirations to be better at what you do is possible without a carrot and stick.
Things are bureaucratic, i agree, but there is also some pragmatism to it you don't notice until you're in it.
Labour and tax laws can be an advantage (some people are more productive when not under stress, which is much more of a factor if you can get fired for whatever reason).
For instance many tax breaks will only work if some very tight conditions are met, like spending a certain amount on something or if your home has an extra room to count for wfh. Labor laws and bureaucracy make it incredibly complicated for freelancers, so there may be many who remain miserable in their corporate jobs.
As far as labor laws, there are few developped countries in the world where they are more permissive for freelancers. In almost every single one of them, there exist even worse roadblocks.
That's not to say the process couldn't be improved, but the competition isn't so much better as one would think.
Employees at startups are easily 50% international. Someone willing to move to a different country has already shown more initiative and willingness to take risks and forgo the comfort of safety than the vast majority of people will ever do.
News article (only in German): https://www.n-tv.de/regionales/niedersachsen-und-bremen/Bran...
Tesla has a fire incident last year (claimed by leftists)
OVH had a fire incident last summer, but Strasbourg is actually France, who knew!
This infrastructure doesn't have to be cutting edge. Even 90s-era tech should be enough to cover a country's basic needs in case of a global collapse or shortage.
It's insane for humanity to continue putting their eggs in one or two baskets.
My argument is that semiconductor manufacturing must also be added to that list. A natural disaster or a war between two countries shouldn't lead to wide-spread famine or throw humanity back into the dark ages.
Supply chains and globalization should be very much rethought in this century.
Calling it slave labour is a great sound bite but glosses over the wide variety in working conditions "overseas", and the fact that trade has vastly improved conditions in many such "overseas" countries.
I have broadly the opposite view about supply chains and globalisation; the inter-reliance of countries and the trade in labour/goods/services leads to diplomacy, negotiation, communication, better understanding and ultimately a safer, better world. History has demonstrated this consistently if you take a long view.
The direction of "make everything in your own country, rely on no other country for anything" is the opposite to all of the above: less need for diplomacy, less leverage in negotiation, less communication, less understanding. That's a sad direction for the world to move in.
Is there any point at which we say "it is wrong to remove wealth from my country, put a fraction of it into working conditions unthinkable in my country, and let the owners of the means of production pocket the rest"? Shouldn't we mandate US-like living conditions and safety regulations if we are going to ethically export labor?
To make that mandate at the beginning is simply to decide not to export labour, since the trade can't happen if you apply those conditions from the outset. That's worse for everybody: your t-shirt costs more, and the worker in Cambodia or Bangladesh goes back to subsistence farming.
The present system of international trade has delivered a marked improvement in living conditions for labour-exporting countries. It's always worthwhile to talk about how to make further improvement happen faster, but mandates aren't the solution — to pretend economic realities don't exist doesn't make them go away.
The majority of the jobs you call slavery are indeed in horrible conditions, but still better paying than substistence farming, thus being one of the ways people can break the circle of poverty.
Exploitation needs to be weighed and reigned in, but rather than taking industry back home, it would be better to just make sure that workers in poor countries are also paid fair wages.
Exporting materials (steel), industrial capacity (famously, container ships), labor (Saudi Arabian oilfield workers and nurses in Germany among others), and mercenaries (Vietnam War).
Wages from which were taken by the government and invested (via national monopolies such as Samsung and Hyundai) into more infrastructure growth. Which slowly led to the Korea of today. Add in a dash of democratization and you get the softpower exporting, shipbuilding, chip fabbing regional power today.
It’s an interesting case study into I guess so-called “benevolent dictatorships” that managed to democratize itself (very very violently by the way), and then kept its nationalistic spirit going to weather through an IMF Credit Crisis to become what it is today.
Why don't you? Why is it unethical to save a penny for a stockholder yet it isn't unethical for you to save a penny by buying foreign produced goods? Sure, there are many specific brands unavailable domestically, but you can find some variation of everything you need locally.
Even if there are exceptions to that, I would bet you rarely choose to purchase domestic goods because they're too expensive. Supply chains operate at the maximum possible efficiency to save you as much money as possible. If you're willing to spend more to uphold your ideals, then do it. You already have the option.
Tim Cook famously said that Apple can’t move manufacturing to the US because the US does not have the industrial engineers needed to make and run those factories.
Ever see American Made on Netflix? Chinese industrial capacity, processes and standards are on some different level of refinement.
It's a fair point to make, but doesn't mean that OP shouldn't be doing their part by buying domestically if they really hate that some products get manufactured in another country. If everyone who complained about this issue decides to only buy domestically the domestic market would be much stronger.
At the "buy all American", I disagree with your point that I could possibly source everything in my house from the United States even if I had a million dollars - and if I could, though it would make me feel better, it doesn't change the macro fact.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
If there is no demand then yes, absolutely. It's normal for countries (inc. the US) to run and subsidize their infrastructure at a loss if it is critical to their national security.
The US military has a large pool of mechanics and technicians they constantly train who then go on to private sector. Building things, and building things right, take a level of physical dexterity and mechanical intelligence that must be honed.
Ever see a machinist run a hand over a milled surface, call it out of tolerance by 0.005” and then the calipers confirm? You can’t learn that from a book that shit is straight just 25 years of looking and touching surfaces that smooth. Drilling straight holes into metal frames that bend and give is an art.
You can’t let that die. So the military funds shops everywhere to build widgets for the war machine to keep people employed and those skills alive in the event that when we do need tens of thousands of them at once, there are seasoned veterans ready to lead the way. And in the mean time, they make $150k a year running a small machine shop in Michigan subcontracting for Northrup or Lockheed or something.
Why not do it for just about every critical part of life? Why only do it for the "being ready to kill adversaries" subset?
If you work for the IRS or the USPS, don’t you get guaranteed work, public health insurance and a pension after some number of decades of service?
More broadly I think about all teachers and first responders.
Governments can subsidize their use in local industries or even build the infrastructure themselves doing what many governments already do with power, telecommunications, and transport.
The G7 and G20 aren’t an exclusive club for nothing. There are real things behind GDP.
If that makes goods too expensive for the population (it won't) they couldn't afford them anyways. They were simply paying for the goods by mortgaging their future.
Mandatory trade relationsips and closely interconnected supply chains are an important factor in preventing larger wars.
The reality slowly dawning on us is that if goods cross borders, soliders don't have to.
The cold war maybe felt cold on the other side of the globe. Was very much hot here. My country is barely older than peace is.
So let's say that we have a democracy by that definition, for example Myanmar — a big garment exporter — in 2020 or so. The 2020 elections were described by international organisations as "free and fair".
Should the result of the coup d'état that happened shortly after those elections be that not only do the garment workers lose their right to vote in future free and fair elections, but they also lose their jobs when the factories are closed due to foreign countries introducing their "don't trade with non-democracies" policy? Do we think that would improve or worsen the situation?
It's not an easy choice when human lives hang in the balance. My view is that allowing authoritarians to entrench themselves for years, generations, possibly centuries is by far worse. We know that democracy is a fragile state of affairs. It rarely occurs without a violent overthrow of the elite and often doesn't last very long. Despotism, on the other hand, is common and long lasting because it is unabashed about cowing people through violence, torture, murder, blackmail, and all the other evils you can imagine. If we want to keep our freedom we must continually resist all attempts to take it.
Even sanctions generally apply only to specific individuals and groups, rather than entire economies. Unfortunately, risk-averse financial institituions generally treat them in practice as applying to entire economies, since it can be virtually impossible otherwise to ensure you are not dealing with a sanctioned individual/group.
Kinda funny when you consider we literally put all our eggs in exactly two baskets, both on males and females.
Is impacting the semi supply chain the hot, new weapon of the US-China tech cold war?
But since it is stupidity and given the track record of the countries involved, I wouldn't completely rule out that someone might pull a stunt like this.
Edit: funny that people here think that this is statement is somehow something that could be considered a contentious topic.
semiengineering has a startup section with investments for people that are more interested in facts than emotions:
That's very debatable. Maybe you are taking all the improvements China has made in construction, manufacturing and nuclear industry, and assigning them an 'innovation value' of zero. Maybe you are assigning non-zero innovation to exploiters of gig economy like Deliveroo.
I'm not.
> Maybe you are assigning non-zero innovation to exploiters of gig economy like Deliveroo.
Also no.
This is simply a product of developing and inventing new ideas and technology, and using them to produce trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth. If it was simply about poor labor rights and environmental regulations they wouldn't be where there are today, as there is a large number of countries with much more permissive environments.
Twenty years ago people said that it was all just because their wages are low. Now their wages are higher than several EU countries and almost all of South America, and they still are doing more with less. There is no other explanation, this is simply because they have expertise, ideas, and innovations that others countries don't or can't put into practice. The bite is absolutely matching the bark.
If there really isn't much innovation and expertise there, everyone else would be doing it. The prize here is in the trillions of dollars.
> This is simply a product of developing and inventing new ideas and technology,
"simply" (also using vast quantities of coal, poor working conditions and other air and water pollution regulations).
> and using them to produce trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth. If it was simply about poor labor rights and environmental regulations they wouldn't be where there are today,
I didn't say it was simple, you are the one who keeps trying to say it is simple. But they definitely achieve competitive advantages that way.
> as there is a large number of countries with much more permissive environments.
Non sequitur.
> Twenty years ago people said that it was all just because their wages are low.
Lots of people say lots of incorrect stuff all the time, not just 20 years ago. This isn't really an argument. Environmental concerns have been high on the radar for a long time.
> Now their wages are higher than several EU countries and almost all of South America, and they still are doing more with less. There is no other explanation, this is simply because they have expertise, ideas, and innovations that others countries don't or can't put into practice.
Their manufacturing industry overall is clearly extremely good in general. Not in all specifics (particularly high-tech sectors) like automotive, aerospace, silicon, etc etc, but as a whole of course they are major leaders in many types of manufacturing.
> The bite is absolutely matching the bark.
Absolutely not in terms of innovation and development of new technology and ideas across all areas.
You just had a huge thread of repeating this over an over, and you have never stated why you believe this, what have you counted or measured to arrive at that conclusion? Patents? GDP growth, scientific papers? Is it 'just a feeling'?
I just had a huge thread of others repeating over and over that I was wrong, without actually addressing what I wrote. That's why the thread got so huge.
Secondly the statement is poorly defined - you have different ideas about what counts as 'innovation'.
Third, it is quantitive, but none of the arguments/statements given by either side have any quantities attached.
I don't have a dog in the fight, but if your centered your argument around patents, or GDP growth, or research funding and papers, you would have a more productive discussion.
No it wouldn't. You clearly haven't understood the discussion or issues if you believe that. I think that's why you're finding it so confusing.
Many companies were hit by digital trade secret theft that was sent to China, so they are more than capable of bypassing the billions of R&D by getting access to the designs and going from there with government backing.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Chinese semi industry highly focussed on silicon carbide for automotive power electronics, with EUV being a skunkworks project taking place in Europe.
Catching up is definitely a lot easier and yes it does take time, but it's not a given. They've been trying to catch up with jet engines for almost as long as the west or Russia have been working on them, certainly would have out-spent the Russians by a wide margin on the effort. So far unable to match western or even Russian designs. Although maybe in just the past few months they might have finally got something which is at least good enough, just spending a lot of money for a long time doesn't guarantee results.
They are nowhere even near to having spent as much as the Russians in resources. You forget that the economy of the USSR was a massive powerhouse, that allocated absolutely massive incestments in military technology.
The Chinese, on the other hand, acrually aren't incesting as much money on these technologies as one would think. The only company (SOE) that has any stake in jet engines is Shenyang, and despite also making whole aircraft, drones and so on, they have 15 000 employees for the whole operation.
Comparatively, Pratt and Whitney, which does only engines and nothing else, and is one of four companies capable of making modern turbofan engines, has more than twice the employees as Shenyang, which designs and manufactures multiple different aircraft. Boeing has ten times as many employees as Shenyang.
As far as outinvesting the Russians, we can compare again the number of employees. The most advanced Russian engines are produced by UEC Saturn, which only makes engines, and by itself has 21 000 employees.
That's again more than Shenyang, which doesn't only make engines.
So no, it's patently false that the Chinese are deploying more resources with less results.
> They are nowhere even near to having spent as much as the Russians in resources. You forget that the economy of the USSR was a massive powerhouse, that allocated absolutely massive incestments in military technology.
China is far bigger than USSR ever was, and has been for a while, it also has massive military investments and has always had far more people it could China is absolutely massive in terms of population it can bring to task. So I doubt this. USSR had a pretty large GDP by the end of it yes, but just looking at that is the same mistake as just looking at China's GDP now -- it was not always that large.
> The Chinese, on the other hand, acrually aren't incesting as much money on these technologies as one would think. [etc]
Well I don't think anybody actually knows what exactly they are investing other than they've clearly wanted competitive engines for 60-70 years. But either way this matches what I say about the noise coming from China not really matching the results coming from them, in terms of innovation and developing new technology.
China never, ever, ever had anywhere near the engineering resources of the Soviet Union. To suggest as much is insanity. They arrived to that level somewhere before 2010.
China already has competitive engines. They can and do simply buy Russian engines. Domestic engine development is a nice-to-have, and not a huge priority. This is obviously reflected in the low budgets and the low number of employees in these programs. This is public information.
Nope, the WP-1A was built in 1958. Just because they were incapable of designing their own competitive jet engine does not mean they were not attempting to.
> China never, ever, ever had anywhere near the engineering resources of the Soviet Union. To suggest as much is insanity. They arrived to that level somewhere before 2010.
You mean somewhere after? Totally disagree. Clearly there were not good or well run resources like the soviets, but they had the money and the manpower earlier than that. If you're just looking at GDP overlap that is misleading because it does not account for more people in China, or the relative advantage it gets from much stronger computing power and ability to copy more advanced designs. Also you're taking the GDP from the height of the USSR, which is not representative of its economic power for those same 70 years it was designing engines.
> China already has competitive engines. They can and do simply buy Russian engines.
Not the most advanced ones.
> Domestic engine development is a nice-to-have, and not a huge priority. This is obviously reflected in the low budgets and the low number of employees in these programs. This is public information.
That shows how much you know. It is a huge priority for them and it has been for a long time.
The first Chinese-designed jet engine was the WP-14, and the project started in the mid 80s.
China did not have enough engineers to rival the USSR until after the fall.
> That shows how much you know. It is a huge priority for them and it has been for a long time.
It really hasn't. Defence in general is not a big priority of the Chinese state. Even within defence, producing new airframes is a much bigger than domestic engines.
> Not the most advanced ones.
Incorrect. The most advanced Russian engine in mass production is the AL-31F series, which is sold to China. Further developments intended for production, the AL-41F, are not in mass production.
The WP-5 was the VK-1 clone which was the first jet built in China in 1956.
The WP-1A was a Chinese design in built in 1958.
After that they claim not to have developed any, but that's because they were all failures until Kunlun which they don't want to boast about so they make that one sound like the very first effort. It was not.
> China did not have enough engineers to rival the USSR until after the fall.
Maybe. It doesn't take 30 years to train an engineer though. How many engineers did they have?
> It really hasn't.
It really has. They've been trying to reverse engineer and clone Russian engines for a long time. Why would they be doing that if they were satisfied just buying Russian?
> Defence in general is not a big priority of the Chinese state. Even within defence, producing new airframes is a much bigger than domestic engines.
That's what they claim of course because they don't like to draw attention to their failures.
> Incorrect. The most advanced Russian engine in mass production is the AL-31F series, which is sold to China. Further developments intended for production, the AL-41F, are not in mass production.
So not the most advanced ones.
China has singlehandedly (to the extent that a billion people can be considered a "single hand") dropped the cost of solar energy from five times as expensive as fossil fuels to half as expensive as fossil fuels in only ten years, an innovation that will probably stop global warming and usher in an unprecedented age of energy abundance starting about eight years from now. And it's not just solar; Chinese-designed nuclear reactors are also starting to be exported around the world. JLCPCB has automated custom circuit-board assembly to the point where you can get prototypes in your hands for US$10, two orders of magnitude cheaper than previously. When covid hit China, before PCR tests and antibody tests, they haled people caught with fever into walk-in fever clinics where they got chest-only CT scans, and by July they had developed a vaccine and were vaccinating people who had to travel abroad, five months before any vaccines were approved in most other countries, including the US, Germany, the UK, and Russia. And obviously every electronic device you own is mostly made in China unless it's an antique.
Can you imagine an Englishman in World War II saying, "It's also not clear that the US is particularly good at leading high tech innovation. If you just look at the pounds and shillings, they should be inventing new technology at a similar rate as the UK. Doesn't seem like they're pulling their weight."?
It is not westerners exploiting cheap labor, tho it may have started that way. It is really the scale of their talent pool, the number of engineers that graduate every year is nearly 10x what the US gets around to, and they idea that they just sit around waiting for an American company to design something for them is farcical.
A product I designed and make was ripped off in China. I’m pretty sure it isn’t all handwringing and negative emotions.
Ricardian comparative advantage, which doesn't require the party you go to to be better at the thing you are going to them to do than you are, only that you are enough better at something else that doing the thing you are outsourcing would require giving up more of the other thing.
It's about opportunity cost, not absolute proficiency.
But exercising centralized control while eliminating internal dissent through propaganda or ignoring it because dissenters are effectively disenfranchised, as much as it's a thing many people in the US would love to do, isn't one of the things we outsource to China (neither, viewing the same claim through a different lens, is physical Infrastructure in the US.) So, to the extent that that story reflects something they genuinely have absolute advantage in, it's not really relevant to the “why do we go to them for the things we go to them” for. Heck, a lot of the things we have gone to them for, like low-cost manufacturing of a variety of goods, are moving out from China to other places as they develop just as they moved out of more developed places to China, because with more development comes higher proficiency in areas that less developed states can't substitute for at all, so comparative advantage leads to them getting more of the things they can do, even if they aren't great at them on an absolute scale.
The West tends to take interests of people whose real property (including homes) blocks the right of way into account. While it does encourage NIMBYs from blocking everything, I find it better than the "here be the state railway, now pack your things and begone" approach.
Also, dissenters and politically unreliable people are forbidden from using such trains in China [0].
[0] https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-international-news-ch...
Do you mean Sinovac CoronaVac, CanSino Convidecia, Minhai, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences vaccine, Medigen, Zifivax, or one of the three Sinopharm vaccines? Because actually China developed nine vaccines, not one.
One of them is in fact the one other countries clamor for most: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoronaVac says, "A real-world study of tens of millions of Chileans who received CoronaVac found it 66% effective against symptomatic COVID-19, 88% against hospitalization, 90% against ICU admissions, and 86% against deaths. ... As of July 2021, CoronaVac was the most widely used COVID-19 vaccine in the world, with 943 million doses delivered. As of 14 October 2021, CoronaVac is the COVID-19 vaccine with most doses administered worldwide." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoronaVac#Authorizations shows that it's approved almost everywhere in the world except the Five Eyes countries, Russia, and the EU.
But I was talking about CanSino Convidecia, the single-dose vaccine they wanted to give me here in the hospital until they heard I was probably going to need to travel to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convidecia says, "In February 2021, global data from Phase III trials and 101 COVID cases showed that the vaccine had a 65.7% efficacy in preventing moderate symptoms of COVID-19, and 91% efficacy in preventing severe disease. ... According to the Chinese state media, the team registered an experimental COVID-19 vaccine for Phase I trial in China on 17 March 2020 to test its safety. The trial was conducted on 108 healthy adults aged 18 to 60 in two medical facilities in Wuhan, Hubei province. ... In April, Ad5-nCoV became the first COVID-19 vaccine candidate in the world to begin Phase II trials. ... On 25 June 2020, China approved the vaccine for limited use by the military."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_COVID-19_vaccine_de... explains in more detail, "On 24 June 2020, China approved the CanSino vaccine for limited use in the military, and two inactivated virus vaccines for emergency use in high-risk occupations." It cites https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3103121/coro..., which explains that by September --- two months before any vaccines were approved in most other countries --- 350,000 people had already been vaccinated in China.
Convidecia isn't approved in nearly as many countries as CoronaVac and the Sinopharm BIBP vaccine, but the particular achievement I wanted to point out here was being able to get vaccines (three different vaccines) deployed to people who needed them in the field, six months after the pandemic was discovered and six months before any other country in the world. And, contrary to your claims, it turned out to be a lot more than 50% effective.
So, in this case as well as in many others, "It's also not clear that China is particularly good at leading high tech innovation. If you just look at the dollars and cents, they should be inventing new technology at a similar rate as the US. Doesn't seem like they're pulling their weight," is the opposite extreme from the truth, to an astounding degree.
EUV took decades and billions of dollars in trial and error before the current techniques were figured out. Due to the West's tendency to publish successful techniques, China won't have to repeat these steps.
As an example where this hasn't worked so well, COMAC's aircraft production has not been doing too hot.
Japan and Korea also have pretty big talent in related areas. I believe that Intellectual Property often wears shoes, but a lot of SW, methods, specs, etc can be appropriated more quickly.
All I can think of is dr. Evil saying "one MILLION dollars".
1. One side thinks[1] that it will hurt the other side more than it does to itself.
2. Politically it can handle/sell the cost of such an action.
3. There is a leader who is ready to execute it as his agenda.
[1] Only have to think so, it doesn't have to even be true.
(sabotage has so many other risks that it's not a good idea)
If it is, at best only temporarily. The US is perfectly capable of setting up its own complete supply chain if there were the political motivation and do so in a relatively short time frame. China is perfectly aware of this so it will never become a serious issue, they would just be shooting themselves in the foot and cutting themselves off from our (sometimes unwilling) technology transfer.
EUV step and scan systems are roughly the size of a bus, fractal system complexity and sophistication that rivals the LHC, and mirrors with a roughness two orders of magnitude finer than what the JWST space telescope has to work with (namely .2nm compared to 20nm).
Please do not underestimate the difficulty of manufacturing EUV systems, ASML only manages to build a few dozen a year for a reason :)
Just call the three or four companies you think would be the closest and tell them they’ll be competing to build the capacity paid for by the defense department.
There are many example of big government funded projects that crumble under their own weight, despite being inundated with cash. Look at NASA's SLS, the DoD's trillion dollar plane projects, big government software projects in general.
For truly large, complex systems, it's not enough to throw more money at the problem. You need an organization that can manage the complexity in the first place, otherwise you can spend as many years and trillions as you want with little to show for it.
You can't suddenly create experts by throwing money at random business people.
If all it took was a few billion dollars, don’t you think someone would have already funded it and started a profitable company?
That's not to say that is impossible, but without good examples we can all say a bunch of stuff and it won't mean anything.
You can look at the history of the Defense Production Act (1950) to see it in action several times building up local industries with lots of cheap money.
You cannot just throw any bodies at a problem like creating ASML. You have to throw very specific bodies with each one having at least a decade or more of very specific expertise (it seems like, based on the comments and articles I have read). That is just ASML, not even getting into the deep expertise TSMC must need to execute, or even Apple in designing.
Knowledge itself has expanded tremendously since WW2 such that to be top of the field in WW2 required much less time than to be top of the field today.
“””
bachElor’s EnrollmEnt and dEgrEEs Enrollment in undergraduate engineering programs increased this year continuing a decade long trend to 622,502 full-time students in 2018. Degrees awarded increased to 131,937 for reporting institutions (136, 233 including non- reporting institutions). The three engineering disciplines producing the most degrees in 2018 were, as in 2017, mechanical engineering, with 31,936 degrees, computer science (inside engineering) with 19,082 degrees and electrical engineering with 13,767.
mastEr’s EnrollmEnt and dEgrEEs There was an increase in 2018 in enrollment in master’s engineering programs with a total of 93,559 students enrolled, a 6,687 student increase over 2017. The number of master’s degrees awarded increased to 66,340 for 2018. The three disciplines representing 39% of all engineering master’s graduates are computer science (inside engineering), with 10,946 graduates, mechanical engineering with 8,160 graduates and electrical engineering with 7,048 graduates.
doctoral EnrollmEnt and dEgrEEs In 2018 there were 12,156 doctorates awarded 78,715 full-time students enrolled in doctoral programs. The 5 disciplines with a combined total of 60% of the doctoral graduates in 2018 are mechanical, electrical/computer engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering and computer science (inside engineering
“””
Fermi, Teller, Bohr, von Neumann, Bethe, Szilard, Einstein - not every one of them was directly involved, but they all moved to America and taught younger generations of American physicists.
It later turned out that one container had over-pressure and a chemical escaped trough an outlet... no people were harmed though but every leave in the vicinity turned completely brown...
There is still a big market for it though. The obvious and predictable result is that the stockpiles don’t end up in a bunker but in peoples homes and consist of ever stronger and more dangerous items.
So this went from about 5 visits per emergency location per year to about 2. Totally and completely insignificant.
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/asml/after-hou...
> Eine automatische Reinigungsanlage sei auf etwa 200 Quadratmetern in Brand geraten.
> According to the fire brigade, only part of the plant was affected by the fire. An automatic cleaning system caught fire on around 200 square meters.
https://www-heise-de.translate.goog/news/Brand-bei-ASML-Folg...
"At this point it is too early to make any statement on the damage or whether the incident will have any impact on the output plan for this year. It will take a few days to conduct a thorough investigation and make a full assessment. "
https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2022/fire-incide...
ASML manufacturing, OVH data center, and even Astra Zeneca's largest vaccine manufacturing site, which is perhaps one of the largest in the world, costing them enormous sums in lost contracts in the early stages of the COVID vaccination effort.
The best question to ask is, who benefits? It seems that more often than not it is a large American company or conglomerate.
Having said that: Berlin is a very "un-German" city in the sense that it seems unable to get things under control. At first they were broke ("poor but sexy", as the slogan went), then they where overwhelmed by tourists and aspiring artists, and now there's not a single free apartment anywhere. The bureaucracy is slow and everything is forever under construction. The BER airport exemplifies all of this at once.
Having said that, it's one of my favorite places in the world: there's a vibrant, multicultural art community, everything is more laid back, it has plenty of beautiful corners and parks, and you don't need a car at all.
It's a city with a special character, but I can also understand those who would rather live in a more predictable place.
It's as close as one can get, with about 200m missing because, I guess, the driver decided nobody would care about the rest of this godforsaken industrial area. Or they got a call at exactly that moment that Google would stop gathering photos to spite the criticism of data protection advocates that was annoying them at the time.