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Comment by jpgvm | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I think it's likely they get an EUV machine working but with less efficiency than ASML just because of how long it takes to tune these beasts and work out all the kinks.

The big brain move is to try leap-frog the whole thing with XFEL. Smaller wavelength, way brighter source, no vaporized tin particulate, etc. It's a much bigger lift, new optics, new resists, etc. So a completely brand new supply-chain from scatch but with no competitors on that tech yet and low will for Western companies to try compete on it because they need to get money out of existing EUV tech first.

This is very similar IMO to Chinese auto manufacturing. Their ICE cars never really did meet the same standards as European or Japanese manufacturers despite JVs etc.

However EVs and green-tech are analagous to the XFEL path, they built from scratch and leapt over the competition that was happy to sit on it's existing profitable tech instead.

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> However EVs and green-tech are analagous to the XFEL path, they built from scratch and leapt over the competition that was happy to sit on it's existing profitable tech instead.

I'm not convinced Chinese EVs are technologically better. They've just command economied demand and reduced costs via mass production. The technology seems pretty inline with anything available in the West but demand isn't there to take advantage of scale. China is ahead in EVs by metric of quantity for sure but I don't think they're got next gen battery tech they are keeping secret.

Making batteries for $80/kWh IS the next gen tech. I’m pretty sure China invented lipo (EDIT: I meant lfp) (at least they’re the only ones making it) and they’re currently pushing ahead on sodium ion. They are also the ones who have pushed lithium ion to the point it is today. My first EV was a Nissan Leaf that cost 40 grand and could drive 80 miles. Now you can buy 300-mile cars for about that. That was all China’s doing and nearly every EV on the road today uses their batteries.

They have done to the battery market exactly what Taiwan did to the chip market. You can buy an EV made anywhere the same way you can buy a laptop made anywhere. But guess where the chips and batteries were made.

They didn't invent LiPo (and you probably don't want those in a car), nor did they invent LFP (LiFePO4) but they did license it when no one else wanted to and turned it into probably the best EV battery tech you can buy today. They didn't innovate a ton on the chemistry but they did on the packaging side, BYD and CATLs structural pack designs exploit the low thermal runaway characteristics in a way that wouldn't be safe for NMC etc to reach near parity on density but with better longevity and cost.

They will be the first to sodium ion and solid state though.

It's kind of ironic that BMW pushed CATL into the EV market [1].

[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/30/how-herbert-diess-zeng-...

XFEL is going to be destructive to the chip. It can't be the future.

One could tune an FEL to precisely the same wavelength as ASML’s setup if one were so inclined. (Subject to all kinds of complications, as the high energy electron sources needed are complex and EUV light is hard to work with. But there isn’t much of a fundamental constraint on the ability to adjust the wavelength of a FEL.)

But not an XFEL. If it's an XFEL you are going for destructive exposures.

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