184
Dutch government to ban ASML from servicing installed wafer tools in China
(www.tomshardware.com)
Oh damn. This is MAJOR if enforced/enforcable.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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That must mean China is only months away from major breakthroughs that will replace ASML in their supply chains and show everyone that they never needed them in the first place. They only bought from the dutch out of the good of their hearts. Or so they will claim and tankies as well as some tech illiterates tech journalists will gobble that up like they do every time.
Clearly behind them there's the USA pushing for that.
Isn't this dangerous, like playing with fire? I don't think that China is going to be "oh no the software license is expire, we give up and close all the factories", rather going to invest billions to find an alternative and make ASML irrelevant in the country. It won't be fast to see cloned machines but isn't it better to keep them tied to licenses and expensive periodic maintenance instead of pushing a temporary roadblock that will lead to the development of workarounds, unofficial cheap maintenance routines and cloned machines?
I don't think you understand the mountain of technology advancement that those machines need in order to keep operating. I won't elaborate since there's so much on this topic already on the interwebs. Needless to say. The machines can only operate for a few weeks at a time and often require maintenance at that time. So turn off the maintenance and the machines stop working altogether.
China reverse engineering EVERYTHING if you think they can't, you clearly don't see previous history, they aren't fast but they WILL do it eventually, if there's enough motivation (sanctions or/and profit)
They are probably the most complex machines ever created by humanity though, and requires expertise across the whole world to build. Even if they had blueprints, it would take years just to get the manufacturing right.
Yup exactly. The machine's serviceable parts need very specific and complicated techniques to produce. Whatever you think China can conjure together, they're gonna be dancing for around the same amount of time it took the US, Germany and the Netherlands to produce. So about a decade. Sure they got most of the machine already if I understand correctly, but that's like giving a broken iPad to a monkey. And don't feel bad if you're Chinese, it would be the same if any other group of people tried to make it.
I said that aren't fast, but they get job done, why do you think there are so many Chinese engineers working around the globe? They get rehired for very good money by Chinese companies when they get enough expertise, Chinese companies headhunt too
While they likely do have the capability of doing that eventually, there are only two places in the world that have the capability of doing the super small nm scale chips: Netherlands and Taiwan. These machines are insanely complicated and precise. I wouldn't be surprised if China was a decade or more away from doing it themselves. I could be wrong, but this scale of chips is an entirely different monster.
Now, they could be closer, but this particular job isn't that simple.
there are only two places in the world that have the capability of doing the super small nm scale chips: Netherlands and Taiwan.
No, there's only one company in the world that can make these machines: ASML in the Netherlands. TSMC, Intel, Samsung, and everyone else buy their machines from ASML, who has a monopoly on the EUV machines necessary for modern semiconductor nodes.
These machines emit UV at the precise wavelengths necessary by very precisely generating droplets of tin, to be blasted by high powered lasers to create a highly charged plasma that emits UV, then precisely arranged reflectors to focus those beams onto silicon wafers through a mask. Even things like small changes in humidity and air pressure throw off the calibration, so the clean rooms are engineered to keep that constant no matter what the outdoor weather is, and any fab has ultra sensitive seismic detectors to anticipate seismic activity that might affect yields, and the systems have to account for the vibrations generated by human footsteps, fans and other equipment, etc.
The level of precision necessary for current generation fabs is so far beyond any one company or any one country's capabilities.
Believe it or not the state of Oregon also...intel is getting their second high-na euv from ASML soon
If you asked me to pick a state for that, Oregon would not have been it
People here (including the US govt apparently) acting like it's actually going to take China a decade to figure out how to run a wafer machine bruh.
Not only do they probably already have the procedures written down and kept safe, they've been already been experimenting with having to run the entire supply chain on their own for years now. Hell they're even the ones basically carrying RISC-V development right now because they barely have OEM access to x86.
And that's all without the assumption that China hasn't stolen some key trade secrets that would give them a head start. I highly doubt this equipment will actually go offline besides some practice runs and research application which they have likely already done without telling anyone.
Pakistan's entire nuclear arsenal only exists because one talented due working at URENCO (also coincidentally Dutch like ASML) took a few hundred documents and his years of work experience back to his home country. If broke ass Pakistan could figure out how to make fissile material and nukes in their backyard, China sure as hell gonna figure out how to fabricate chips without any external suppliers or contractors.
If broke ass Pakistan could figure out how to make fissile material and nukes in their backyard, China sure as hell gonna figure out how to fabricate chips without any external suppliers or contractors.
It needs a special kind of technical illiteracy to think those two things are in any way comparable.
China can fabricate chips, all on their own alright, they have home-brewn equipment. So can Russia, and the chips you get out of that suffice for military use. It's like 90s tech. Russia doesn't have scale either that's why they're buying Chinese.
Enriching uranium and making nukes, in comparison, is banging rocks together.
Also I don't think the US is involved in this, at least not directly: The US hold license for the tech underlying EUV lithography, but this is about servicing DUV machines. You can get that kind of machine from e.g. Nikon, It's just as likely that this is the Dutch still being mad over MH-17 and want to pressure Xi to pressure Russia.
It's not 90s tech though, especially for China.
Their latest x86 CPU is comparable to Kaby Lake in cycle speed which is only 8 years old, except it comes with more cores and supports DDR5 so it might as well be a first gen ryzen 7.
They still haven't revealed how they fabricated it or what process they used, probably because they want to keep the production chain and size a secret.
Enriching uranium and making nukes, in comparison, is banging rocks together.
No it isn't, especially for weapons grade Uranium. Look at Iran, they've been perpetually "10% away from a bomb" for more than 20 years and still haven't succeeded.
The ridiculously high precision required to make the centrifuges, and then the scale required to make hundreds of thousands of them per plant just to reach 20% enrichment is insane.
Reaching 90% is like taking all that and ramping it up several hundred times.
The only reason Pakistan succeeded was because they got (stole) the critical design parameters needed for the centrifuges to work, and a rather brilliant metallurgist who took several years to figure out how to manufacture the centrifuges consistently at scale. Plus an entire set of physicists just to figure out the centrifuge physics in a way that would allow them to maximize refinement with dozens of design variables. It still took them a decade, but they eventually got it.
It's a pretty good comparison to lithography machines which requires similar dead precision with each decreasing size of transistor requiring an order of magnitude more precision in quality engineering.
Also I don't think the US is involved in this, at least not directly:
I doubt it because they've been making it a pretty big deal for the past 4 years. Tons of Chinese tech OEMs are blacklisted, and the trade war keeps escalating with new bans/tariffs/exclusions every year. Plus they dumped billions of dollars into intel and TSMC in a desperate attempt to make a fab on the home front.
It doesn't matter that it's DUV, they just want to ensure they make it harder for China to catch up, so even last gen tech is on the line because they believe it can be studied and reverse engineered.
imo it's a stupid shortsighted policy, but it's nothing new for the US pulling these types of moves. I just wish for once they'd see that it'll only delay the inevitable, and maybe they should put that effort into actually making quality products at home instead of throwing money at chip OEMs and expecting them to move out of Taiwan overnight.
It’s not 90s tech though, especially for China.
Their latest x86 CPU is comparable to Kaby Lake in cycle speed which is only 8 years old, except it comes with more cores and supports DDR5 so it might as well be a first gen ryzen 7.
You're confusing process nodes and chip design, here. Chinese indigenous process tech is on a 90s level, or at least the most behind parts of it are (e.g. they may have good domestic sputterers but their lithography lacks behind). They're using off the shelf DUV for the bulk of their chip production, bought from Japan, the Netherlands, etc.
And they're good at DUV. Taiwanese and western producers switched over to EUV to achieve better nodes, China couldn't get at EUV machines and is squeezing the last nanometres out of DUV. Still not using domestic machines, though. Those DUV machines are what the Dutch are threatening right now.
No it isn’t, especially for weapons grade Uranium. Look at Iran, they’ve been perpetually “10% away from a bomb” for more than 20 years and still haven’t succeeded.
They probably either a) already have but aren't telling anyone or b) strategically kneecap the programme and use it as a political pressure tool. Like the deal they made, remember. Iran is practically uninvadable also without nukes and everybody knows it.
On the other side of the spectrum, both when it comes to "actually really, really wants to have nukes" and "barely past stone-age": North Korea did it already, the tech is bulky but also very well understood and comparatively primitive. Yes, more complicated than a washing machine, but nowhere close to chip making.
The only reason Pakistan succeeded
50 years ago.
It doesn’t matter that it’s DUV, they just want to ensure they make it harder for China to catch up, so even last gen tech is on the line because they believe it can be studied and reverse engineered.
The US don't have legal means to stop the Dutch doing DUV anything. They have for EUV because they developed that tech, but not DUV. Which means it would need to convince or strong-arm the Dutch government, which has larger implied political costs and would only make sense if they're also doing it with the Japanese. We'll see whether that happens.
imo it’s a stupid shortsighted policy, but it’s nothing new for the US pulling these types of moves.
They very much like to protect Intel, yes. The issue with Intel isn't their fabs or processes (the occasional hiccup nonwithstanding) it's their complacency in design. As a pure-play fab Intel would be neck-by-neck with TSMC.