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This Machine Could Keep Moore’s Law on Track
(spectrum.ieee.org)
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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Technology
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My favorite part about the microchip production line is that it all depends on one company (ASML) in the Netherlands and their R&D. They make double digit quantities of EUV machine and that's it: they dictate the entirety of "easy" technological speed advances in computing.
And then they ship to a micropseudonation being threatened by the most powerful Eastern country just thousands of kilometers away. That's where the chips are actually produced.
And this entire process is predicated on quantum physicists banging together light waves that literally turn chip design into a probabilistically modeled engineering problem.
What fun!
Shoutouts to Asianometry for having the best videos on all sorts of the chip design process. He covers a ton of other stuff but his interests just about align with mine so I'm a huge fan.
Also, the optics needed for ASML to manufacture their machines is only made by the Swiss company Zeiss.
Precision manufacturing is not ubiquitous. China made their first independently manufactured ballpoint pen in 2015.
Zeiss is German, they also produce substantially more than just the optics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss_SMT
China is already working on the software part of chip design, and they have domestic capability to produce 14nm chips (SMIC) that is using ASML machines though. (But the US cannot take them away, only stop them buying more). I'm sure they are considering building their own fabrication machines. I fully believe China is capable of domesticating the whole fabrication process given some time. China was able to design and build their own domestic computer in the cold war, a few years after the US, but taking less total time than the US did. China is the world's leading productive superpower, and what I think is most important, is they have a culture of teamwork, rather than competition, to drive innovation.