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
It’s not difficult to remake. What is difficult is to secure sufficient parts and suppliers so that you can create enough semicon fab tools to achieve a cost effective productivity that beats existing customers.
EUV requires a great understanding of some pretty high level physics. It generates extreme UV using laser pulsed tin droplet plasma, it’s going to take a while to get that down.
You don’t just magically learn the underlying physics and understand the quirks by taking something apart.
There are lots of fiddly little quirks in real engineering that are often subtle or even completely masked by how the system was built, especially when dealing with processes in the nanometer scale. Slight variations in the tin droplets could change the distribution of the UV. A motor that vibrates a bit different because they picked a different type of bearing could result in everything being garbage.
EUV research started in the 1990s but it wasn’t until 2018 that the first machine came to be. Reverse engineering, building, qualifying, and mass producing machines within a decade would still be a 3x speed up.
You’re also left with, why make the same thing?
If you’re going to spend 10-20 years and $100B on pretty raw R&D, why make today’s system? Why not work to design the system you’re going to need in 10 years? This is also why no one is really competing with ASML for EUV machines, don’t spend billions breaking into an established market when there is a new one just around the corner you could claim all of for the same price
I’m a thin film optics engineer and make some optics for ASML. Deep UV optics are incredibly hard to make. Any contamination during the process causes issues, absorption, laser damage, durability problems and the sources for that contamination are near infinite. A DUV optics shop will have spent years, maybe a decade getting their entire supply chain and internal tribal knowledge up to snuff. Things like that don’t necessarily transport well to another country. Like if our company said hey take everything you know, all of our documentation on all of our processes and go make these parts in China, it would take years to get that setup and that’s with DUV tribal knowledge! So sure, you could like DSIMS the optics and find out material and design, but knowing the theoretical design of something, and knowing how to successfully produce something that meets those design requirements are not the same thing.
EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography) technology is difficult to develop because it requires knowledge of cutting edge technology in a number of different scientific fields that are all highly controlled: optics, electronics, materials science, and lithography. Not just knowledge of how they work, but the more sophisticated knowledge of how to *manufacture the components at a meaningful scale.*
The reason it is so difficult to develop is because Ultraviolet radiation at such extremely small wavelengths is extremely energetic. So energetic that it does not like to refract like normal light, and requires a complicated system of gradually focusing mirrors to focus the beam. The technology for these optical refractors is only understood by a handful of the most advanced optics companies, Zeiss being the most prominent one. The construction of these focusing lenses requires knowledge of specialized lensing materials, angles and manufacturing technologies that none else has access to.
To complicate matters further, the source of the extreme ultraviolet radiation is a highly complex laser driven plasma element that is poorly understood outside of ASML.
To put the icing on this omega complicated cake is the masking process that becomes extremely complicated at such small sizes. The purpose of EUV is to help etch nano scale circuits in silicon. But at such small sizes you encounter significant quantum interference. This requires sophisticated understanding of how to design the ‘mask’ that contains the circuitry you want to etch (think of this like a very fancy stencil). Without extensive research and testing into the properties of EUV light you would not be able to make proper use of the mask, and develop new masks for your chips.
So, in the spirit of the sub, I’ll give a simpler explanation. EUV lithography is such a significant departure from previous lithography methods that it poses a nearly insurmountable obstacle to reverse engineering or copying. Without understanding all of the science that went into testing and producing all of these individually cutting edge technologies you cannot even begin to build the machinery to produce the EUV light. And even if you did, the process of developing the mask at these small scales is so complicated that it requires years of testing and development without insider knowledge.
The level of precision required is mind blowing. I’m the semiconductor, every iteration comes off the back of improvements in dozens of areas by dozens of specialized companies, with very specific knowledge required. I believe EUV took something like 20 years to develop. ASML has a monopoly because they’re the only ones who spent the time to figure it out
EUV barely works in the best of circumstances and they have no capability of getting a machine to their country to do the reverse engineering
I’m a thin film optics engineer and make some optics for ASML. Deep UV optics are incredibly hard to make. Any contamination during the process causes issues, absorption, laser damage, durability problems and the sources for that contamination are near infinite. A DUV optics shop will have spent years, maybe a decade getting their entire supply chain and internal tribal knowledge up to snuff. Things like that don’t necessarily transport well to another country. Like if our company said hey take everything you know, all of our documentation on all of our processes and go make these parts in China, it would take years to get that setup and that’s with DUV tribal knowledge! So sure, you could like DSIMS the optics and find out material and design, but knowing the theoretical design of something, and knowing how to successfully produce something that meets those design requirements are not the same thing.
Watch [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fxv3JoS1uY8) showing a microprocessor in more and more detail.
Notice all those lines that cross over and under each other at about the 2 minute mark? Those are wires that connect all the components on the chip. Under neath them are the transistors and other integrated components of the chip. Every single component has connections that need to be made and wires that aren’t supposed to be connected can’t touch for the chip to work properly.
This is done in a very similar way to stone or wood block printing (you make a mask that shows where a wire should be and then remove the material that wasn’t covered by your mask). Then you do it again.
Near the very end they show a grid showing squares that are 20 nanometers across, (the chip being zoomed into is very old technology that’s much larger). That means all the wires and stuff are much, much smaller to support transistors that are 20nm rather than the size on the chip they’re zooming into.
ASML makes equipment that lets you make chips that have 3nm components meaning each small square would contain 50 modern squares.
EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography) technology is difficult to develop because it requires knowledge of cutting edge technology in a number of different scientific fields that are all highly controlled: optics, electronics, materials science, and lithography. Not just knowledge of how they work, but the more sophisticated knowledge of how to *manufacture the components at a meaningful scale.*
The reason it is so difficult to develop is because Ultraviolet radiation at such extremely small wavelengths is extremely energetic. So energetic that it does not like to refract like normal light, and requires a complicated system of gradually focusing mirrors to focus the beam. The technology for these optical refractors is only understood by a handful of the most advanced optics companies, Zeiss being the most prominent one. The construction of these focusing lenses requires knowledge of specialized lensing materials, angles and manufacturing technologies that none else has access to.
To complicate matters further, the source of the extreme ultraviolet radiation is a highly complex laser driven plasma element that is poorly understood outside of ASML.
To put the icing on this omega complicated cake is the masking process that becomes extremely complicated at such small sizes. The purpose of EUV is to help etch nano scale circuits in silicon. But at such small sizes you encounter significant quantum interference. This requires sophisticated understanding of how to design the ‘mask’ that contains the circuitry you want to etch (think of this like a very fancy stencil). Without extensive research and testing into the properties of EUV light you would not be able to make proper use of the mask, and develop new masks for your chips.
So, in the spirit of the sub, I’ll give a simpler explanation. EUV lithography is such a significant departure from previous lithography methods that it poses a nearly insurmountable obstacle to reverse engineering or copying. Without understanding all of the science that went into testing and producing all of these individually cutting edge technologies you cannot even begin to build the machinery to produce the EUV light. And even if you did, the process of developing the mask at these small scales is so complicated that it requires years of testing and development without insider knowledge.
The level of precision required is mind blowing. I’m the semiconductor, every iteration comes off the back of improvements in dozens of areas by dozens of specialized companies, with very specific knowledge required. I believe EUV took something like 20 years to develop. ASML has a monopoly because they’re the only ones who spent the time to figure it out
Latest Answers