Comment on Dutch government to ban ASML from servicing installed wafer tools in China
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoI 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.
bruhduh@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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)
UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
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.
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
pop@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
And this is why they’ve been beating every hurdle the west has put up against them. Keep equating people to monkeys and wait for them to shit you on the face. Fuck the CCP, but there are probably more people than US, Germany and the Netherlands combined working specifically in chip manufacturing in China.
If you only ever think there’s just one solution to a problem and everyone else are monkeys scratching their ass. You give them more reasons to beat the odds.
Keep it up though.
Tech has gotten cheaper since China got into the race and the whining on the other side has only made it more enjoyable.
bruhduh@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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
RagingHungryPanda@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
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.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Entropywins@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Believe it or not the state of Oregon also…intel is getting their second high-na euv from ASML soon
RagingHungryPanda@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
If you asked me to pick a state for that, Oregon would not have been it