This is clearly a significant achievement, but does anyone with semiconductor experience have a sense of how far "generates EUV light" is from "production-ready tool"?
This isn't a moat ASML can keep for long though. There can be alternatove technologies to achieve the same goal. So far only China has that incentive. The real problem is process scaling is slowing down. How many more generations of lithography machines will ASML design? Probably not many. This means there will be no edge left in 5 or 10 years, as eventually brute force will work and China will achieve the same lithography resolution.
Till that point, they are just going all in with cheap coal + solar, so even if they use older machines and run longer exposure times, even if they achieve lower yields and toss away a lot of the dies, they are still economically competitive. At the end cheap enery solves a lot of the issues.
The US is close to having that incentive, if the rift between the US and Europe keeps widening. The Netherlands has one lever, but damn it's a long one.
The biggest losers from any such actual attempt by Europe will be Western Europe and the US.
I really like that Europeans are starting to be more patriotic. It's good to see. It's also fortunate that European leaders are aware of Europe's position and role in geopolitics.
The US exerts sufficient control over ASML that this will not happen without NATO ending. And the end of NATO (which would be a geopolitical shift more profound than the Fall of the Berlin Wall) and a replacement with some Chinese EUV light source risks the scuttling of all ASML facilities and devices. This is vapor above a coffee cup.
To enable the whole thing to work you'd need the US to have shrunk to the equivalent of Canada in influence. I'm not saying that's impossible, but in that scenario, the Dutch might well be trying to keep Russians out of Amsterdam and the Turks out of Germany rather than trying to pull an IP heist on the Americans.
You can buy an e-book on Kindle and Amazon still controls what you do with it, right? ASML's ownership of Cymer is like that, except it's the US instead of Amazon.
Of course it does, that's why I wrote about export controls but the context is not current state of the world, but what OP wrote:
> If Uncle Sam pisses off Europa Regina enough, she won't give a damn about licenses.
And in this very different state of the world, export controls are worth the same as paper they were written on.
Right now their chips are already "economically" competitive, as in SMIC is starving on 20% margins vs ASML/TSMC/NVIDIA getting gluttonous on 50-70%, at least for enterprise AI. Current scarcity pricing = litho costs borderline rounding error, 1500 Nvidia chip flips for 30000, 6000 huawei chip flips for 20000. The problem is really # of tools access and throughput. They can only bring in so many expensive ASML machines, including smuggling, which caps how much wafers they can afford to toss at low yield. They figure out domestic DUV to 2000 series and throughput is solved.
Hence IMO people sleeping on Huawei 9030 on 5nm DUV SAQP, still using ASML DUV for high overlay requirement processes, domestic DUV to fill rest. But once they figure out SAQP overlay, which will come before EUV, they're "set". For cost a 300m-400m ASML EUV, PRC can brrrt tools at BOM / cost plus margin. Think 40 domestic DUVs and associated infra for price of one ASML EUV to run 8x lines with 30% yield and still build 2x more chips normalized for compute that they can run on cheap local energy to match operating costs. Then they have export shenanigans like bundle 5nm chips with renewable energy projects and all of sudden PRC data center + energy combo deals might be globally competitive with 3/2nm. Deal with our shitter chips for now, once they deprecate we give you something better when our processes narrows gap, and you have bonus power to boot because some jurisdictions, building grid is harder than building fabs.
The thing that helps prevent smuggling of ASML machines is that a) there are few of them (i.e., people would notice), b) it requires tremendous effort to move them at all, let alone without anyone noticing.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-says-all-its-sites-o...
Smuggling part is happening on the old machines before EUV. There's a lot of them available on the second hand market thanks to Europe and US keep shutting down their old fabs. I don't think any DUV machine is smuggled. Even if they physically smuggled one, you need a team of ASML engineers to set it up and calibrate. You can guess what ASML will do in this case.
By the way, let's don't forget: ASML doesn't have any problems with China. They are incredibly annoyed with US and Dutch governments. This is potentially the biggest market they are missing out. Even then, they won't tolerate a summugling operation.
How do longer exposure times and older machines enable 2nm process nodes?
I don't personally understand why suitable EUV light sources are so hard to build, but evidently, they are. It sounds like a big deal if China is catching up in that area.
As I ironically said in another comment, all you need is a retired Chinese ex employee at Zeiss.
Nothing can stay private or secret forever, and they have the money and people to achieve that. Even if it takes them another 5 years to reach what we have today.
That bit struck me as naive, given the instances of Americans who aren't Chinese nationals, or even ethnically Chinese at all, caught committing actual espionage on behalf of China.