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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

Number of patents is a stupid measure and it's not better then common sense and common knowledge. You're writing this on a device produced in asia, and designed in the US, running an operating system made by a US company, using a browser made by a US company. But european companies have patents, so they're doing fine.

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- Snapdragon SoCs use ARM cores a chip architecture designed by ... ARM (UK)

- TSMC and Samsung Chip fabrication is done with machinery designed by ASML (Netherlands)

- ASML litography is only possible with precision optics designed by Zeiss (Germany)

- The Linux kernel of the 'US' designed OS is actually Finnish.

Cherry picking will paint whatever picture you want.

Linus Torvalds has been living in the US for a long time and is a US citizen. If [1] is accurate, the top Linux kernel contributor is Chinese, and almost all significant Linux contributors are outside of Europe. Arm microarchitecture is often designed in Austin, TX according to friends of mine at Arm. ASML and Zeiss are great, but, as a European, rather than gloating, I look, with great sadness, at the trajectory over the last half century, and see that the number European technology world-leaders has been steadily decreasing.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/

To tell the truth, ARM Holdings was founded by Acorn, a British company, and VLSI, an American company, with Apple, also an American company, investing some cash. Eventually the likes of Texas Instruments and other US companies joined, and a ton of smaller Eoropean companies was bought / merged in. So it's a truly cross-Atlantic venture.

OTOH ASML is definitely European, and, frankly, has no serious competition anywhere on the planet.

Using machines developed and produced in Europe (ASML, for example). Innovation is not defined by who makes your phone

The most critical element of the EUV machine, the light source, was designed by an American company, Cymer (now a fully owned subsidiary of ASML). The second most critical element, the Zeiss optics, are European, but I’d consider that more precision manufacturing than high technology.

One can always play that game and find that actually almost any country is the only source of innovation by choosing the abort condition carefully (just as an example: the most important component of the light source is the high-power pulsed laser source, which is made by Trumpf - a German company).

Ya if you didn’t know what you were talking about or were lying you could say some other step in the value chain is the source of the critical IP. But in this case it’s pretty clear that the innovation took place at Cymer and Trumpf is the much more commodity component supplier.

Is it though? The laser needed for the laser-induced plasma EUV source are nothing you can buy of-the-shelve and is nothing trivial to design and Trumpf has lots of expertise in this area (since they are not just a supplier for lasers, but use the lasers themselves for machine tools). Could another company have made it? Probably! But the same is true for the whole EUV light source, since Cymer wasn't the only game in town after all (there were a number of other companies working on it in the US and in Europe) - with ASML also collaborating with several potential competing suppliers at the same time. But no one really cares about anyone but the winners in the end, so only ASML and Trumpf are left standing in the end to bask in the glory.

Uh yes of course there were several competing potential suppliers of light sources (just as there were entire EUV systems) but all the other ones didn’t work and were not close to working. That is the definition of a critical enabling technology. Cymer was in fact the only game in town.

Only one that worked is patently incorrect, since early ASML R&D units shipped with non-cymer EUV light sources (some Philips collaboration iirc). Best performance at the time maybe (be it reliability/output power/size/..), but not the only one that worked at all, so no..

They other light sources were orders of magnitude below the required brightness with no path to required commercial brightness, ie they didn’t work

I don't think that was true. Gigaphoton achieved similar numbers to Cymer roughly a year later with a very similar design idea (so unclear why they would have had no path forward? they are still on-par today with Cymer as far as I can tell), XTREME was not too far behind (within factor 3 I would say).

Running on a British designed CPU architecture (Arm Ltd.) and with ICs made using Dutch made machines (ASML Holding N.V.)

Actually, my OS was written by a guy in Finland.

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