Dutch government to ban ASML from servicing installed wafer tools in China

Comments

• LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Oh damn. This is MAJOR if enforced/enforcable.

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• Wispy2891@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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?

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  • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • bruhduh@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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)

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  • Edie@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Correct. And inshallah, the US will sanction itself into isolation.

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    • bruhduh@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      inshallah brother

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• CosmoNova@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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• mlg@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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. They can’t do EUV lithography that’s a whole another magnitude harder. The US can’t build them, either, they have to buy European machines (which use US-developed technology but there’s a difference between doing something in a lab and doing 2000 wafers an hour). Said ASML machines. Building your own is a decades-long research project and you won’t make your money back because everyone else buys ASML.

    Enriching uranium and making nukes, in comparison, is banging rocks together.

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    • mlg@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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