ASML, a $300B Dutch firm, makes the machines that make semiconductors
A few highlights from a conversation with a friend who works for Zeiss and regularly deals with ASML (take this with a grain of salt, I may have misunderstood some of it and he also may not be an expert in all of these areas):- The lenses (actually mirrors for EUV) only demagnify by a factor of 4. So your wafer template is already extremely small and costs millions to produce.- 13.5nm is pretty much the smallest wavelength you can reasonably handle. If you want to go smaller, you have to build a particle accelerator. (He heard that from a colleague, wasn't sure how much of that was actually true.)- The prices in this Twitter thread are pretty spot on. The EU wants to invest into chip making to become more independent in this area. But the sums they're talking about wouldn't even pay for one such machine. Politicians don't seem to be aware of the dimensions we're talking about here.- Also in the thread, ASML has a monopoly on this tech. Others have not invested into EUV and by now, it's pretty much impossible for anybody to catch up.- Everyone's hiring like crazy atm. He started home office during Covid and now Zeiss says he can't even go back to the office because they don't have enough office space anymore. He doesn't mind. Everyone's distributed all over the place anyway so whether he does conference calls at the office or at home makes no difference.- He said they're not very affected by the chip shortage.