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Comment by lossolo | Hacker News Reader

> US can always retract the EUV license and sell the Cymer light sources to Canon or Nikon if they wish

Then why are they not doing it? Isn't it in the national interest? Why not create a US company that makes EUV machines like ASML does? Why is there only one company in the world capable of doing it if they are "just steppers"?

btw what is used now in EUV machines are step and scan scanners and ASML builds the whole EUV scanner system (stages, metrology, controls, system integration). Scanners replaced steppers for leading edge nodes.

Oh and Cymer is owned by ASML from 2013, so it’s ASML's own US light source business working with TRUMPF (Germany) for the CO2 drive lasers.

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>Why not create a US company that makes EUV machines like ASML does?

They had a stepper manufacturer, Silicon Valley Group (SVG), and ASML bought it, that's how ASML got the EUV license from the US.

SVG didn’t hand ASML a magic EUV license. ASML bought SVG lithography two decades ago to expand in dry/immersion optical litho and US market access. EUV matured later. SVG had momentum in DUV and still couldn't sustain at 193nm while EUV is an order of magnitude more complex. ASML builds the whole scanner and owns the integration IP that makes the parts actually produce yield at scale. The light source matters but without ASML's stages, metrology, optics integration, contamination control, control software etc etc you've got a science project instead of a tool a fab can run. ASML won because the integration problem beat almost everyone else.

>SVG didn’t hand ASML a magic EUV license.

I never said that.

What I meant was that once ASML acquired SVG, it also become a US-based operation, which gave them the leverage over Canon and Nikon when acquiring a EUV license from the US gov as it was now also a US company, not just a Dutch one.

> I never said that.

Reading your first comment in full, it seems like you actually did, at least that's the impression I got from the wording you used. Then you toned it down and didn’t address the other arguments.

What I meant is that simply giving a license to company Y is not the same as being capable of producing the EUV machines that ASML produces. It's similar to TSMC, anyone can buy an ASML machine, but there is only one TSMC, because it's not just about the machine and not just about the light source.

>Then why are they not doing it?

Because ASMR is doing fine by keeping its stuff out of the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

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