One would expect that reverse engineering technologies wouldn’t be impossible.
The importance of these technologies for China is huge.
Moreover, they have a massive budget and probably also own a couple of ASML’s euv lithography machines.
Why is it that they cant remake these machines?
I heard some sources say that it might take them a decade.
In: 338
To give a real world example of “just because you know how it works doesn’t mean you can replicate it”:
Take a ball of yarn, completely unwind it. Then rewind it perfectly, so it looks like a brand new one.
It’s literally just yarn, but it’s really difficult to do without the right equipment and knowhow.
In manufacturing anything, there’s a lot of proprietary knowledge that makes the difference. A lot of companies produce plastic bricks, but none come close to the quality of LEGO, because they have perfected the exact blends of plastic, analysed their behaviour for decades, have the high quality equipment ro actually make them. Even if you infiltrated the company and stole all their secrets, you would need to find professionals with the knowledge and experience to apply it, then the money to get or build the machinery to use that knowledge. By that time, LEGO already moved on.
It’s even more so for ASML. They’re on the very bleeding edge of the technology. By the time you get around to just reverse engineering their current tech and actually replicate it (which is no small task), they have IMPROVED. Hell, trying to find the experts to reverse engineer the tech could be difficult for the sole reason that they likely already work at ASML. So you’re still massively behind.
There’s also the fact that ASML doesn’t exist in a vacuum. They don’t produce all of their own components. They have equally advanced industrial partners. So now you need to replicate not just their tech, but their supply chain.
It’s essentially easier to just do it from scratch, to build up your own institutional knowledge, the professional workforce who can not just copy, but innovate. But that in itself takes years to decades.
Latest Answers