– Why is ASML’s technology so difficult to remake?

Question

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

Answer 1

This won’t be ELI5, and I’m no expert here so please correct me if I’m wrong.

ASML’s technology is possible due to various extremely difficult materials provided by other companies, many of those companies in several different countries.

For example, there are mirrors that are required to be extremely flat. As an analogy, if the mirror was the size of Germany, the tallest mountains would be 1 mm tall. As you might imagine, this is an extremely difficult to produce, highly specialized piece of equipment that ASML developed in collaboration with another company.

Now imagine if you have hundreds, if not thousands, of these sorts of extremely specialized parts, produced in collaboration with companies from all over the globe, and even then, it took billions of dollars and decades of multi-national cooperative R&D to finally produce a single working device.

China has a head start because, now, at least there’s a proven example of how to build such a device. But even if China somehow had the exact same blueprints of the EUV machines, it still would need to replicate the entirety of the specialized infrastructure that enables the production of ASML’s EUV machines.

ASML’s EUV lithography might be the current pinnacle of high-technology in our current world, it’s harder than rocket science, the complexity behind EUV lithography is outright insane.

Edit: [Asianometry](https://www.youtube.com/@Asianometry/videos) has made some excellent videos on ASML, EUV lithograhy, and has been fantastically informative on the sheer insane amounts of complexity involved in the EUV process. I’d highly recommend the channel for anyone that wants to delve into more details around ASML and EUV lithography.