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Comment by Cumpiler69 | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but coming dead last behind Taiwan, Korea, US, Japan and China in the race to cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing is nothing to brag about. That's like celebrating for coming last.

This means you're getting the lowest industry margins, meaning less profits, less money for R&D, less wages and also less geopolitical leverage. This is nothing to celebrate but should be an alarm clock for our elected leader to wake the f up.

A lot of semi research is done in the EU, like at IMEC in Belgium, but few of it ends up commercialized by EU companies, so EU taxpayer money gets spent but other nations get to reap the rewards.

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> nothing to brag about

Maybe some things shouldn't be about bragging but about getting the job done, and cutting edge isn't the only way to do it. If anything, the problem here isn't that it's "just" 16nm but that the EU isn't developing a end-to-end (research to manufacturing) true home grown industry and still relies a lot on external partners like Intel to do it from the outside.

But a good first step to develop enough talent locally that can later flow into domestic alternatives.

Agree with this take. Additionally it brings geopolitical stability by not putting the onus on just one-to-two countries (Taiwan, US) to produce the majority of the worlds info-tech infrastructure. A 16nm process is still very very modern in the grander scope of things.

Be interesting to see if there's integration with research environments within the EU.. otherwise it could fizzle in terms of it's true potential positive impact.

I don't think they want cutting edge tech, they want to be able to not have to stop their entire industry during the next pandemic/war/whatever just because they can't get their hands on a $2 chip made on the other side of the world

It's all well and good shooting for the best, latest semiconductors. It's also well and good securing the source of the rest of the chips used by the rest of the devices in the world. Cars, consumer goods, every industrial machine ever, etc ... A stable domestic supply chain might pay dividends, especially if international order degrades at all.

> but few of it ends up commercialized by EU companies

ASML is massive, no?

Small steps, hopefully they move up from there.

Well big part of the EUV tech used stems from Europe.

False. EUV tech is 100% researched and manufactured in the US.

Edit to answer @ looofooo0: EUV tech comes from Sandia Labs research that ASML licensed, and the EUV light sources (there's no such thing as an EUV laser, the Trmpf is a regular laser firing into tin droplets for EUV generation) are made by Cymer in the US which ASML integrates them into their stepper which is a relative commodity item in comparison to the light-source.

?? ASML builds the EUV machines in Europe. Zeiss builds the optical compentents in Europe. Trumpf builds ne EUV-Laser in Europe.

Moreover, most of the tech stems from the European-funded EUCLIDES (Extreme UV Concept Lithography Development System) project.

You’re forgetting about 2 decades of US DoE funding of EUV research through EUV-LLC which ASML joined late. A lot of the early groundwork and foundational research was done by DoE including using US built synchrotron accelerators to try out various early approaches.

Yes, I think the route was Soviet Union, Japan, USA, Europe.

Europe takes credit for ASML we can't do it without them the lions share of the work it takes to make the machines is due to ASML, it would be nice if they had big tech companies of their own. They decline of Europe is already happening the wealthy aren't as greedy there at least not greedy enough to work as hard as the American thus eventually US interests will control Europe.

Have you seen the salaries at IMEC?

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