Zeiss covers their mirrors and lenses. The smoothness is extreme: "If you were to enlarge such a mirror to the size of Germany, the largest unevenness – the Zugspitze, so to speak – would be a whole 0.1 millimeters high."
Then they have positioning / tilt accuracy.
"If one of these EUV mirrors were to redirect a laser beam and aim it at the Moon, it would be able to hit a ping pong ball on the Moon’s surface."
What they don't say is what the yield is on these. I've heard they have to try and make X to get y that can hit all the specs.
In the machines themselves didn't they have to build in both an electron microscope and an atomic force microscope for defect detection?
And then the environment they operate in is terrible from a wavelength absorption energy / contamination (tin?) issues etc.
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-telescope-mirrors-sharpen-view...
The semi industry is known for being very boom/bust so it’s best not to scale up too quick lest it kill your company.
My comment is that ASML is hitting their profit targets, they have backlog until 2024. If I were leading ASML or an employee of it, I wouldn't want to scale up. I am already hitting my targets, it's cozy, I have backlog until 2024, I have no competition.
The current situation is good for ASML and bad for us.
My comment is equally applicable for all companies in the supply chain that are monopolies.
At some point you're running into actual, real constraints, real bottlenecks in the supply chain, that will take years to resolve. You can't just scale up on short timeframes, no more than you can make a baby in a shorter time frame.
We know that ASML doesn't ship high tech machines to China, it only ships low tech ones. China in return holds the world hostage by not producing enough chips. With enough subsidy, I think we could ramp up production to meet demand.
I also don't understand that the key companies are monopolys. It all seems a bit planned to me. Place the chip manufacturing company in Europe, chip factory in Taiwan, assemble in China. I feel like someone planned to distribute these technologies and infrastructure to avoid having one country having it all.
I know I cannot support my argument, but this is a gut feeling I have.
OTOH, nobody can reasonably explain why there are unsolveable real bottlenecks in the supply chain and why it would take years to resolve. Throw resources and people at it. This is not just one company with limited resources and a single goal. We should fund the semiconductor industry.
I don't think the global economy can "fund" properly more than the current number of actors of this industry, namely each of those zones would have to consider what would be its "local" leading-edge chip manufacturing as a "military defence"-thingy: making money out of it would be optional.
