> Also I suspect most of the countries on the map with low rates are not low with cancer rates but worse public health system. So not very telling
For southern countries, obviously. But the discrepancy between Western Europe (+ Australia and New Zealand) and US+Canada is quite intriguing to say the least.
I can imagine countries with poor healthcare and low life expectancy genuinely have less cancer incidence, because people die before they reach prime cancer age.
Historically, Canon and Nikon were some of the leading suppliers of photolithography equipment. However they seem to have missed the boat on EUV tech. Recently Canon is trying to make a comeback [1].
ASML productivized (in a two decade process with many partners) foundational research licensed from US national labs, research which the Japanese (Nikon & Canon) were barred from licensing due to their then-dominant position. Though it seems unlikely to me that Canon would've gone for it, considering that they never got into ArF lithography.
I would love to know more about the inside history and origin story of ASML. Does anyone know of any good podcasts or blogs/interviews covering some of this?
Update - I just watched it through and it's actually pretty interesting. A bit on the history, then how the tech works, then on the geopolitics of not supplying China with EUV and the like. Interviews the CEO and the Chip Wars guy.
The tech's quite cool in the latest one with 13nm UV. It's absorbed by all known substances so has to operate in a vacuum and the light is produced by them squirting liquid tin at 4000 psi and then zapping the droplets with a 30 KW laser. The machine takes three fully loaded 747s to ship.
I think this stuff may be a bit of a bottle neck with Sam Altman's proposal to invest $7tr in chip making - they are the only people making the state of the art machines and are pretty much flat out already.
ASML took 20 years… even if they can do it twice as fast (not impossible but I have my reservations) it still means a fab is operational in about 2035-2040… better late than never I guess?
> Dutch equipment manufacturer ASML Holding announced they would also open an office in Chitose with 40-50 technical staff to assist Rapidus. While full operation is not expected until 2027, a pilot line is expected to start in 2025.
Why just twice as fast? Once you know that something is doable, it works and the rough direction things can get done really really fast. The Bannister effect is a real thing that can be observed in so many areas.
Chinese leaped ahead once the US banned exports to certain Chinese companies, Turks have become top players in the military drone business after the West didn't sell them the drones.
I mean, obviously there's lots of work to be done but I think people who believe that others can’t do things they can do are very misguided. Laws of physics is the same everywhere and scientific research is quite open, engineers are everywhere and it only takes someone to invest resources to do something.
When you look at what it takes to successfully manufacture chips at these feature sizes you start to believe in the anthropic principle, or maybe I should call it semiconductoric. Veterans in the field can hardly believe its at all possible.
> Why just twice as fast? Once you know that something is doable, it works and the rough direction things can get done really really fast.
I agree on the first part. The second part is full of details. The mirrors have to be just right. The lasers have to be just right. The timings have to be just right. There's a million other things that have to be just right and the path to get there may not be very parallelizable.
Sure its still hard but unlike those who did it first, those coming after don't have to guess as much and spend resources on dead ends.
This is not Taliban getting into semiconductors, this is Japan who is already into semiconductors but lost its edge in this particular field but its leading in some other fields. Therefore they already have a considerable know how on mirrors and laser that they will have to improve on. IMHO the catch up will be much quicker and much cheaper than what the Europeans and Americans spent on to explore the path leading to what we have today.
OTOH you have Intel which never stopped R&D and they still have lots of trouble catching up; arguably they've been trying for almost a decade now, five years if you're being generous. (And they buy tools from ASML! Which other posters explain will also be the case here.)
IMHO Intel's case is more nuanced, they were milking their position until Apple did something extraordinary with TSMC. They are also a giant corporation who has to re-organise and restructure, therefore can't move as fast as a newcomer. Intel's case is a business case, more than an engineering case. Just as Nokia.
The point still stands: they have the infrastructure, the experience, the logistics and the supply chain all secured and they're still at least a couple years behind if not more. It's extremely optimistic to say that it's going to be easier to start from scratch.
Intel was receiving continuous beatings from AMD (Ryzen/Epyc) a few years before Apple came up with M1. 2016/2017 vs 2020. I don't think Apple and Intel are in much competition: Intel doesn't make laptops and lacked Apple's moat when they did, and Apple doesn't sell (amd64) server CPUs.
> they were milking their position until Apple did something extraordinary with TSMC
I mean, that's true from a business perspective.
But they were trying very hard to make the next process node work. They went from a process upgrade every other design generation (the famous "tick-tock") to just tock-ing at 10nm because they couldn't get the next process generation working.
>Sure its still hard but unlike those who did it first, those coming after don't have to guess as much and spend resources on dead ends.
In many domains they do. Once the original creators are retiring or not involved, there are tons of tacit knowledge at every step of the way, from the high level abstract design to specific quirks of some manufacturing equipment, that's very hard to build back.
> Turks have become top players in the military drone business after the West didn't sell them the drones.
Everything is cheaper in Turkey.
They can produce a lower quality drone for 1/10th the price. Bayraktar = $5M, Reaper = $32M.
Of course there's a market!
I doubt the US could produce a drone the quality of Bayraktar for $5M domestically. It's just too expensive here.
The Turks aren't succeeding because they're building better drones. They're succeeding because the market for drones is disposable, and so the quality doesn't need to be as high - in many cases it's better to have a lower price.
China didn't succeed because they can make better T-shirts than the US. They succeeded because they made cheaper T-shirts.
It's not a fair comparison. They're very different classes of devices.
I do think the US could produce a Bayraktar-quality drone for under $5M. The major upside of the Bayraktar is that non-NATO countries can buy it.
Heck, I think many readers of HN could do the same (which obviously wouldn't help with sanctions). Stick a control system on a basic Cessna 152, and you've pretty much got the same capability. That's well south of $1M even.
You don't hear much about Bayraktar TB-2 (specifically) anymore since it's also not very useful anymore. It worked well before Russia was prepared. Now, we're generations ahead. Sky is full of drones, anti-drone warfare, and largely ones the ones used are a fraction of the cost of the Bayraktar TB-2 so it doesn't matter if they're shot down. The other end of the scale is ones less easy to shoot down.
edit: Corrected to write about the specific famed drone useful at the beginning of hostilities in Ukraine, versus Turkish drones in general.
Turkey has a range of drones, the cheapo Bayraktar one is just the most well known.
Some of the Turkish drones are better off not to be well known though, as there are accusation of launching AI controlled attacks and the machines were in charge of picking the humans they killed in Libya - which is a no-no but probably developed by all the leading states.
So no, Turkey isn't in the business of making cheap low quality drones, the range is quite extensive with some models at the cutting edge. All thanks to being in need of drones but not being able to purchase even if they have the resources.
> China didn't succeed because they can make better T-shirts than the US. They succeeded because they made cheaper T-shirts.
Can China make the same quality T-shirts as the US, but at a cheaper price? Then it could be considered better. For most things involving ordinary people, what matters is not what the highest possible quality thing is given no price constraints; what matters is what is economically feasible.
>> Chinese leaped ahead once the US banned exports to certain Chinese companies, <<
hate to nitpick, but this was actually well underway before the US sanction kicked in. SMIC's 7/5nm was already completed by former head of R&D at TSMC in 2020, which was more or less a replica of TSMC's 7nm. It certainly didn't help that the US dept of Commerce allowed over $100+B worth of export licenses to China, 1/3 of them to "blacklisted" entities, in 2022. The Dutch gov't export restriction likewise didn't really start until few months ago, which also allowed latest DUVs capable of 5/7nm.
> However they seem to have missed the boat on EUV tech.
Licensing:
> To address the challenge of EUV lithography, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories were funded in the 1990s to perform basic research into the technical obstacles. The results of this successful effort were disseminated via a public/private partnership Cooperative R&D Agreement (CRADA) with the invention and rights wholly owned by the US government, but licensed and distributed under approval by DOE and Congress.[8] The CRADA consisted of a consortium of private companies and the Labs, manifested as an entity called the Extreme Ultraviolet Limited Liability Company (EUV LLC).[9]
> Intel, Canon, and Nikon (leaders in the field at the time), as well as the Dutch company ASML and Silicon Valley Group (SVG) all sought licensing. Congress denied the Japanese companies the necessary permission as they were perceived as strong technical competitors at the time, and should not benefit from taxpayer-funded research at the expense of American companies.[10] In 2001 SVG was acquired by ASML, leaving ASML as the sole benefactor of the critical technology.[11]
[…]
> This made the once small company ASML the world leader in the production of scanners and monopolist in this cutting edge technology and resulted in a record turnover of 18.6 billion € in 2021, dwarfing their competitors Canon and Nikon who were denied IP access. […]
so they decided foreign technical competitors should not benefit from US taxpayer-funded research (makes sense) but then allowed ASML to buy SVG and thereby monopolizing (quite literally) this most critical of technologies? idiots.
The first part doesn’t make sense at all. A huge percentage of american taxpayer funded research is released openly to the world. It only makes sense in using it to create the latter monopoly, though, I guess showing where incentives really lie.
Intel's focus was chip design and manufacturing, not tooling; it took a long time (and money) for ASML to develop its cutting-edge EUV tech. Besides SVG, ASML also bought other key US EUV component developers like Cymer (lasers) and HMI.
>And yet it was Sony that hurt their camera market shares the most, action cams are a nieche product.
Mirrorless/DSLRs and compacts have been further niche-ified by mobile phones. Many who previously would step up from compacts to a Mirrorless/DSLR have stopped and just use their (now vastly improved) phone cameras.
And mirrorless and DSLRs are maybe more of a niche than action cameras (which tons of average Joes buy, not just extreme sports fans).
Canon and Nikon make more than half of their revenue from industrial or healthcare products. They sure wished for more profit on the customer business as well, but that's not their core competency anymore.
Unfortunately very unlikely. What's more probable is they'll end up with someone taking the blame / escaping the madness through suicide because the miracle was not delivered on time. I'm rooting for them, but without even a working sub-10nm fab there ... well, it's the uphill battle of uphill battles. Are they willing to ask for outside guidance and accept it? Getting training from IBM seems like getting training from an old gas station clerk who used to work in the big fancy factory. (And TSMC is already building fabs, but that just means they will compete with them for labor, and those 100 veterans will just go and work there.)
Luring legacy operations, sure, why not, but ... it doesn't make much sense. It's race to the bottom. If they want to do geopolitically useful thing they should put down their feet and spend on defense of Taiwan.
"If chip supplies from Taiwan halt, ..." yes, economies will collapse. Chips will be the least of our problems. Unless they mean chips for smart bombs.
> Getting training from IBM seems like getting training from an old gas station clerk who used to work in the big fancy factory.
IBM still does a lot of research in chip manufacturing, they revealed a 2nm chip 3 years ago. Arguably they don't do large scale production, and the 2nm isn't mass production technology, but they aren't exactly at the retired gas station clerk level. Honestly they might be a good choice, because who else? Why would TSMC, GlobalFoundries and Intel help a potential competitor?
