I saw someone posit this exact idea at EuroSTAR in Stockholm on Wednesday, fwiw. Two guys from an Australian company suggest this & how both development and testing will be totally prompt based. It got the reaction you’d expect, but it does exist.
It'd be more correct to say that the Nazis were big on Swedish topics such as eugenics. Sweden was world leading in eugenics 'research' for decades before the Nazi party was founded, and the State Institute for Eugenics Research wasn't closed down until 1958.
> Sweden was "neutral" but big on nazism topics such as eugenics.
Social Darwinism, including eugenics, was quite socially acceptable until the Nazis made it unpopular by association, and even then many countries (US, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, I forget which one in Latin America that sterilised poor women without telling them, etc.) still continued practising some parts of it for decades after. It only really became accepted as flat out wrong in the developed world what, in the 70s-90s (as an example, Canada's last residential school closed in 1997)?
The lithography/EUV optics comes from Zeiss. The laser for generating the plasma from Trumpf. Both key elements that ASML would not be able to build in-house or get from a different supplier.
There's a lot of expertise with lithography around the world too (companies like Canon build lithography machines), but we're not talking the usual levels of it.
The EUV lasers ASML/TRUMPF builds don't even work the same way other "conventional" lasers would[1]. You physically can't get there by incrementally improving some existing process. Now I don't know how ZEISS makes mirrors that blown up to the size of a country would have imperfections smaller than a human hair, but I'm pretty sure it's no small feat either.
These companies invested decades and untold sums into this when few other companies even had incentive to attempt it themselves. Sure, other companies could eventually replace them, but you're not closing a 2-decade technology gap in an afternoon.
[1] It's a bit insane, really. Vaporizing falling droplets of tin with two laser pulses 100,000 times a second to get just the right wavelength? Here's a good video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ge2RcvDlgw
It is impressive for sure, but still a lot of other things are. Mirror arrays on JWST, fusion ignition lasers. Diffraction limited optics aren't exactly last year development either: there's a host of other places across several countries who can match Zeiss for what is essentially bespoke builds.
> there's a host of other places across several countries who can match Zeiss for what is essentially bespoke builds.
Ah yes. No development time involved here at all. They just built it. I don't know what ASML, TRUMPF, Zeiss, and occasionally the Fraunhofer Institute were mucking about for 25 years. Completely boring bespoke build. Bah. Could get it from anyone else by next week. Pick an off-the-shelf coating too and be done.
It's a wonder nobody else is taking a slice of those ~4 billion USD of revenue Zeiss is making off a bunch mirrors for lithography machines each year.
There’s always these weird bottlenecks in the supply chain though.
My favorite example is during Covid where reduced boron quantities resulted in less Pyrex glass that makes test tubes meaning transporting vaccines was at points rate limited.
I’ve read similar points in the components for lasers to ASML but can’t remember specifics. Chip shortage is the funny one, ASML require more chips that limit their turnaround times which in itself limits chips.
At the top nodes and volumes, indeed there is no competition. They have a huge headstart handed to them basically by Japan screwing it up in the 90s and no one else being able to step (get it?) up quickly before the gap opened.
However, if they can't keep moving, competition that was trailing behind on larger nodes could get close enough that they become competitors for the high end. At first it would be slightly bigger nodes, but cheaper, which might be an acceptable tradeoff, as not everyone in the world is chasing performace over price. CPUs are so gruesomely overpowered these days that it may not really matter that much in many end applications.
Think AMD coming up behind Intel while Intel was thrashing around.
How long the AI hype continues may be important: if AI capabilities are needed in end-user equipment and that requires the real cutting edge processes, ASML/TSMC keep the advantage.
ASML is going to remain a monopoly and whatever Chinese alternative that there may be is going to stay in China for the foreseeable future.
However because the Chinese electronics industry is so big and they rely so much on imports, when they are building alternatives to the US-controlled semiconductor supply chain (ASML, Applied Materials, TSMC etc.), it will matter at one point for ASML even if the Chinese tools and final products are never exported.
Seriously, try to design anything non-trivial without a TI part anywhere. Even in China, foreign brands are everywhere in electronics, and much of it is imported.
There's a lot of scope left for China to penetrate the "low end" semiconductor (and other electronic parts) market as well.
>> ASML is going to remain a monopoly and whatever Chinese alternative that there may be is going to stay in China.
Suppose China develops a cheaper way to produce the EUV light and sells the tools for half what ASML does. They might sell to others just to become the leader.
Or they skip EUV all together and go straight to xray.
IMO that is the real threat to both ASML and the current Western supply chain. By forcing China out you make it very likely they will choose to leap-frog instead of try play catch-up. They did it with EVs there is a very good chance they do it with semiconductors also.
It would need entirely new resist, lenses, associated inspection, cleaning and repair equipment etc.
Which sounds like a terrible idea until you realize they would need all the same stuff for EUV except when they are done they would still be ~10-15 years behind.
Building an entirely new process based on xray would be challenging certainly but not that much more challenging from going from where they are to EUV.
Alternatively, present wavelengths are what make sense, and attempts to go to shorter wavelength will only cause delay.
If one goes for particle accelerator based systems with wigglers, then of course none of this will matter, since the wavelength will be variable and one can use whatever wavelength is ideal, but the idea that going to shorter wavelengths is always better is something I think is crazy. There'll be some optimal wavelength.
I don't think that applies to technology that no one else really has. China is great at bringing down cost of something the west can already produce...they just flood the market with lower cost versions that destroy the business case for developing those products in the west. Solar panels, rare earth refinement, drones, EVs, etc...the west can do all of that, but if they undercut the market, they won't and eventually those capabilities stagnate.
But if they have something the west doesn't have, why sell it and up an advantage? We aren't friends. There are plenty of things the Chinese aren't selling to the west already (real innovations), and vice versa.
They might want to sell... but who might (want to) buy, outside of Russia and maybe India? The Western world is already decoupling from China and I think it's completely infeasible that anyone wants to create new ties to China.
Anyone is a stretch, not everyone is so keen to take the US side in the trade war at their own expense. South American and African trade is still pretty brisk and growing as far as I know. Mostly they don't have the possibility of onshoring industries that they didn't have in the first place, as opposed to the West where it's more like attempting to re-shore previously-discarded capability. So they don't really have a horse in the race, they're going to be importing anyway.
"Anyone planning a major semiconductor fab in the 2020s", then quite probably, yes.
Everyone wants to do business with China, because China has money (which we gave them) and everyone wants that money (which will ultimately go back to them with change and interest).
Lest we forget, Japan and South Korea are mulling a free trade agreement[1] with China.
Anyone following US-led sanctions against China are doing so dragging their feet and groaning in annoyance.
Yeah if one instance created one ID, then any integration tests creating more than one user would have failed. There were no testing or logging on a system with live users while doing a refactor between two dynamic languages
They had 8 AWS tasks running 5 instances each with code written in TypeScript and Python, with frameworks like next.js, with $40 revenue and only a few weeks dev time?
What the actual fuck hahahaha
This is made worse when they edit saying the reason the codes crap is because of time constraints, but spent their time refactoring across languages and spinning up a distributed system FOR NO REASON. That is self imposed harm juggling features and ridiculous technical complexity. What were they thinking.
Edit: a YC summer ‘23 company who’s product is still behind a waitlist summer ‘24, presumably because of a rewrite to Rust
They even said as much in TFA - "[...] overkill, yes we know, but to be fair we had AWS credits".
Fully acknowledging the irony I am about to invoke - this is why I hate startup culture. Not startups, but this ridiculous culture of "well the VC gave us a million bucks and that bought us $100,000 in AWS credits, so let's just use it."
As someone who has built my company fully on my own dime (and the dimes of two colleagues), it's easy enough to burn piles of money in AWS (or any other cloud) when you're making an attempt at being judicious. Spinning up eight backends (edit: running five instances each, no less!) just because you have money, despite the fact that you know you don't need that much compute, is just insane. If for no other reason than you're just throwing your own credits away.
If I give them a trampoline they shouldn't spend all day jumping on it, just because they can. Especially if they're busy with features.
They literally had 1 instance of the backend per $1 of revenue, and the reason the bug wasn't seen straight away was because they had 40 backend instances each with a single uuid that could be used for users before it broke with non-unique id errors.
To quote Hillel Wayne on LinkedIn, which sums this "study" up nicely:
"""
Yesterday I read a report claiming that Agile projects had "268% Higher Failure Rates" than projects with more upfront planning.
As a fan of upfront planning, and a fan of Empirical Software Engineering, I read the report in more detail.
And I'm pleased to report that it is the single worst study I have ever read.
It is so bad I do not want to share it for fear of spreading a mind-virus, but I can share some highlights:
- The author surveyed 600 people and somehow got P values of 0.00004
- By how he specifically defined "upfront planning", the number of engineers he found practicing it is logically impossible
- Every major calculation table had some sort of error
- The author edited a whole bunch of Wikipedia articles to promote himself, and claims his results can also cure smoking
Today I saw the same report doing on The Register and Slashdot, who both accepted it uncritically. And the hundreds of comments were people accepting the study or suggesting a "confounding factor".
...C'mon, people. You're better than this.
I normally write about Empirical Software Engineering because I think using science to study software engineering is important. But just as important is knowing how to protect yourself from bad science. Anybody who's read a couple of research papers would see P<0.00004 as a major, MAJOR red flag.
Being in STEM doesn't make us immune to pseudoscience. And we're forever vulnerable to seeing something that confirms our beliefs and not digging deeper to make sure it's not lies.
"""
