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Comment by Veliladon | Hacker News Reader

TSMC has been badgering their customers to move to 28nm for the past year. They've even been building out more 193nm capacity usable down to N12 because they can do it without waiting on ASML (Nikon can provide 193nm immersion lithography equipment) since ASML is where all the EUV advanced node supply chain holdup actually is. For everything that's not EUV probably 2024 is when wafer starts stop being insane.

The rest of us waiting for high end processes to expand in availability and drop in price? ASML basically has an infinite waitlist at this point.

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Is it possible that ASMLs supply chains get broken, and they stop being able to deliver new machines indefinitely? I worry we might be at Peak IC.

The last few years ASML's problem was not supply chains, it was a very high demand. Production was ramped up successfully, but not enough to meet that demand. With regards to Peak IC: atoms aren't getting smaller, Feynmans' "Plenty of room at the bottom" might indeed run it's end.

If you chronically can’t meet demand for your critical patented technology, should you be forced to license on terms that allow demand to be met?

The issue isn't patent licensing. If it was, we'd see something competitive coming out of China.

Not for something like ASML which is bleeding edge manufacturing tech that only one company in the world has figured out. It’s very very difficult to replicate that research unless you steal it and replicate all of the surrounding work. Stealing is the easy part and I’m sure China has done that and is attempting replication. But there’s a lot more involved to it I think that’s tricky, troubleshooting and solving bugs is harder when you haven’t internalized how things work (you’re basically rediscovering all the things ASML has learned producing and integrating their tech into a finished product).

That's exactly what I mean. Patents requires publishing so that it could be replicated.

Knowing the underlying principles is only a starting point. The hard work is going from that to production.

Sounds simple, costs millions.

A nation state like China is developed enough that it doesn’t care about millions or even billions for something as strategic as this. They’re looking to potentially invade Taiwan to take over TSMC to get their hands on bleeding edge tech which is going to be significant more difficult and expensive.

East Germany tried the same strategy during the Cold war

Companies know this and a) intentionally make the parents vague (also helps with enforcement) and b) keep a huge amount back as trade secrets. That’s why you have industrial espionage.

Patents don't provide enough information to replicate an invention generally. Especially for complex industrial processes.

The principal goes that no, your prices rise which throttles demand until the two meet, then with the extra money you've charged, you build out new production capacity. That's the idea of free market anyway.

That assumes supply chains still exist that can provide all of the necessary components.

Nah, since US has banned China there's definitely less of a demand.

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