How did that go for China and Russia during the last... 20 years of them throwing all their money and brain power at it?
No, ASML is guarding profound insights. I run a community for silicon valley veterans from areas like silicon design, manufacturing, hardware design, top-tier testing equipment, military and research lab prototyping, etc. The stuff ASML is doing is night on impossible, and even the brightest minds I know in that community find it hard to begin to imagine the minute details that really make ASML's tech stack a possibility as opposed to a flight of fancy.
There's a very good reason why the powers that be decided to move heaven and earth to get TSMC out of Taiwan and onto safer ground. This knowledge is at the very edge of what we know about physics and manufacturing. There's no replicating it, there's only losing it and starting again from scratch with no genius insight at all.
I hope ASML has something like an internal journal, like oldschool HP or Bell Systems, and one day they'll release it, because it will revolutionize what we know about a lot of practical engineering, even if by then it's 30 years behind the curve of what they're doing at that point.
