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Comment by KermitTheFrog | Hacker News Reader

Non-zero chances - yes. Unavoidable - I wouldn't be so sure. I can't imagine how many top human-hours and cutting-edge inventions involved to construct this machine. And much of this simply cannot be stolen or bought, no matter how much money you have.

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It has never happened in the history of the world that a company or country could maintain its technological advance indefinitely.

Either China will catch up on this or that particular technology will become obsolete. But it is certain that they won't stay behind forever (measured in a small number of decades at most).

Right but if you dont say how long it will take them, youre not really saying anything.

> measured in a small number of decades at most

By "a small number of decades" do you mean from now, or starting from 15 years ago when the ASML Twinscan NXE:3100 made it debut?

There is no doubt that less than 10 years will be needed for China to be able to do something equivalent to what the ASML machines can do now.

What is far less certain is what ASML will be able to do at that time, i.e. if they will be able to progress significantly over the state-of-the-art of today, or they will reach a plateau.

Besides China, there is a renewed effort in Japan to become competitive again, so ASML may face in the future both Chinese and Japanese competitors.

5 years China 5 years Japan 10 years Korea

I mean you’ve definitely just had technology disappear though, usually because of war. Damascus Steel was a lost military tech. We could certainly end up just accidentally (or worse, intentionally) bomb this stuff out of existence so nobody has it.

This is kind of like saying you can prove everyone dies based on the evidence that everyone who is not currently alive has died.

You might place an upper limit using history but in this case I'd guess that limit would end up being much larger than the present semiconductor industry itself might last.

I'd say it is more likely than within 20 years the domestic Chinese semiconductor industry will be state-of-the-art across the full vertical and horizontal range.

There is a level of arrogance in the West that China does cheap but simple/low quality whereas this is only a stepping stone along the way. German car manufacturers went into China during the 90s with that mindset, and expecting it was forever, well they don't think that anymore...

One can ballpark it, during EUV commercialization, ASML had 15k employees, Zeiss 3k, Cymer 1k. 20 years of non priority commercial development, lots of setbacks. Final integration ~5k suppliers. For reference commercial aviation Boeing/Airbus with as 100k employees, 50k suppliers. And we don't even know it's correct technical roadmap. Initially they thought synchrotron better than plasma/LPP but went with latter because synchrotron too expensive, now EUV machine prices ballooned to multiple synchrotron price. Don't be surprise if we find it dead end non competitive tech in 5-10 years if PRC or JP figures out SSMB/FEL etc, LPP may become economically uncompetitive and all ASML EUV becomes stranded assets. This real possibly because while ASML LPP works, it works at far higher cost than original projections, i.e. it's overbudget techstack with lethal scaling costs.

On paper EUV relatively modest undertaking vs commercial aviation, EUV deeper integration vs commercial aviation breadth, but in terms of scale of effort for nation state coordination, EUV probably all things considered, easier to replicate because it has no regulatory slowdown, it's purely host country physics problem. Having enough talent and throwing it at problem x espionage x poaching talent x time will likely solve precision physics problem sooner than later. Vs commercial aviation which has complicated geopolitical/regulatory hurdles and magnitude more suppliers and scale. TLDR EUV has smaller organizational surface area for determined state to pursue through concentrating $$$, talent and effort. You can buy a ex ASML to bootstrap EUV development, much harder to get globe to buy COMAC without decades of airworthiness. There's a reason western analysts predict PRC EUV in 2030s (meanwhile PRC already beat prototype estimate timeline), but probably not realistic for global COMAC in same timeframe, and PRC been hammering at commercial aviation seriously long before EUV.

That's the key - if it was done once, it can be done again, and likely it's going to be significantly cheaper/easier because it's known it can be done. We see this from olympic records (e.g., the 4 minute mile was a "barrier" until one day it was passed and suddenly a bunch of people passed it).

Of course, doing it "legally" is another question - someone in the US trying to replicate would likely run into patent and other issues.

But a top-secret Manhattan-style project done by the US or China? definitely doable, and if you add spy-shit in, perhaps even faster.

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