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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what it would cost Apple to recreate ASML.

Ask China, they've been trying for a decade.

Give them enough time and they will. EUV will hit limits anyway in a decade.

For china it's DUV+packaging for now, NIL/DSA mid-term, and MoS₂/2D chips long term. But wafer scale, defect free 2D logic is 20–30 yrs out, so no EUV shortcut anytime soon

Yeah but China wasn't (and won't be) given the tech. The fastest path for Apple would be to get POTUS a gold iPad in exchange for the US removing exclusivity terms for the EUV tech they gave ASML.

And SMIC is a decade or less behind without any of that.

Thanks to a combination of espionage and homegrown Chinese technology advancements, they went from "decades behind" to "years behind" quite rapidly on several critical parts of the chip manufacturing process.

China isn't quite there yet, but they will catch up. The question then becomes whether China can surpass the west or if they're stuck in lock-step behind us.

It's very difficult. It took ASML 20 years, and Apple has none of the core competences to make this happen, like optical lithography, EUV optics, plasma physics, vacuum, laser, sources...and then they would have to catch-up to the other tech. For example, today's top end ASML stages accelerate with >10g while still having nm position accuracy.

I can't find the article, but there was an estimate to catch up to ASML would cost between $100 - $200 Billion. You'd also be competing with ASML for a very small talent pool the whole time. See the $100 million payouts for AI researchers, for instance.

This is something the Chinese government is actively trying to do, it's not theory. I'm interested to see what the results are, because they are absolutely not competing for the same talent pool as ASML, they're attempting to create an entirely Chinese supply chain and talent pool.

I don't know enough about chips to say whether any of these numbers make sense.

China is decades behind the West in EUV technology. The attempt to create an independent supply chain is also a forced choice since all the EUV supply chain and knowledge pool are heavily protected by the West and are so complex and big that China cannot sidestep it even with a lot of resources.

Those numbers are realistic. EUV is the most complex machine ever built by humans

There's no way to catch up really - if they keep innovating like they are it's not possible to bridge that gap.

Also, it's probably a patent minefield.

Having directly worked on fab process engineering typically if its patented it’s going to get copied.

I think even then patents can be prohibitive or else https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45181828 does not mean anything.

Years of time and an organizational distraction more importantly than money IMO. Then the same for TSMC if the goal was autonomy.

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