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Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

Yah, they should have been panicking four years ago. They can probably come back, but i'm betting in order to do it, they will have to temporary shift their higher margin devices to TSMC's more advanced process to keep up or just accept being second fiddle for a while. The question is whether all the cuts required to do that kill the company as they are forced to exist on the low margin devices they have been shunning for the past 15 years.

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We better hope they come back. TSMC is a really impressive company, but we can't let one company be entirely responsible for a part that is require for an advanced economy.

You mean like ASML already is? They are the only manufacturer of EUV lithography equipment for fabs.

https://analyticsindiamag.com/is-asml-the-most-important-tec...

Yep, they are another good example.

Intel is really not that far behind TSMC in the grand scheme of things, though, so it would be good to hang on to them before the situation is totally hopeless.

I'm not aware, at least, of any US competition to ASML.

Except that Intel currently fabs ASICs for roughly 0% of the cell phone market. TSMC has a massive lead on that front. Intel selling off StrongARM 16 years ago was massively shortsighted.

ASML is a bigger single point of failure, since they make the machine most critical to any modern fab from Intel, TSMC, or Samsung.

Sure. Intel and their competition sell directly to consumers, so any tech savvy person is at least vaguely aware of their relative positions in the market. I'm less familiar with ASML (other than the fact that, of course, they make that important part) -- haven't looked into setting up a fab! Do they have US competition that is "pretty close" in the same sense that Intel is to TSMC?

ASML bought out their US competition decades ago. Nikon and Canon used to be their main competition in lithography machines, but both of them fell behind even before EUV.

ASML's EUV tech was originally funded by the US (EUV LLC, joint industry/government collaboration from the late 90s), and that is why the US can still impose export restrictions on ASML to China.

ASML was spun out of Philips which is not a US company so I'm not sure how accurate it is to claim this as a main factor.

Government/industry consortiums on both the US and Europe sides ended up joining efforts. EUV LLC on the US side, EUCLIDES (Extreme UV Concept Lithography Development System) on the EU side (in which ASML and Philips was involved). The EUV LLC part is why the US can still prevent export to China of ASML's EUV technology.

ASML didn't come out of the US, but rather parts of their EUV technology did and the US still holds some rights to export controls through that history.

No one else produces the equipment that supports this production process.

I model it like a sovereign default risk, only the sovereign is a corporation.

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