As many of you can probably tell, I am not an expert in this subject. If there's anything to add or anything I got wrong, let me know here in the comments (like I could stop you). EDIT: As many, MANY comments have pointed out - and rightfully so - I was wrong about Phillips being based in the US. This was a misreading on my part. The details are that Phillips and several other companies came together to form a consortium in 1997 to develop the EUV technology, and since many of those companies were in the US, they formed an LLC based in the US, which is why the US holds sway when it comes to EUV tech. I was trying to trim the fat on the script and cut out the details about the LLC, but in the process mistakenly assumed Phillips was in the US. So yeah, my bad on that one.
The bible account is just mythological account based on the idea of the Golem , a clay statue with the right word written onto it comes to life , mud, clay etc is the wording used... Had the bible said silicon I might have been impressed ..
Hey Joe, a nominal correction, the process order i.e. "5nm" or "2nm" does not mean what people think it means. For more than a decade now the numbers have just been used arbitrarily to indicate "this one is better" and don't actually represent the size or density of transistors on the dies.
Hi Joe, ASML is indeed a very key player in the manufacturing of the cutting edge of semiconductors but just to be clear other companies are in the space such as Nikon and Canon, both Japanese companies. They are not at the cutting edge, but are alternatives. If you want to do more research on these companies yourself you can check out a fellow educational TH-camr "Asianometry", on pretty much everything related to semiconductor manufacturing, from silicon ingots to packaging technology and more. You might've seen him during research of this video. ASML is closer to a system integrator like Boeing, rather than being vertically integrated. The optics they use are from Zeiss, a German optics company with a rich history in precision optics. ASML has hundreds of suppliers for the many parts that go into their machines, as it is not economical nor flexible to engage in cutting edge technology. If you do a follow up at all it would be prudent to dig into the details.
I could have sworn Hyundai corporation is involved in wafer production? Also I am outdated , but didn't we already max out on the number of n-gates before the signal started bleeding through the walls, like in the early 90's they couldn't make the chip smaller for this reason so speed was snagged until they started using ALIASING 2X, Quad whatever comes next NO?
I definitely recommend you look into Asianometry here on TH-cam! They explain lithography stuff pretty nicely! And as for around 4:30, the 5 nanometres and 2 nanometres thing is the "process node". The name of the process of making the chips, they don't mean the actual size of the transistor gates. Ever since around 100nm the size has long since detached from the process node name. iirc 7nm is around 45 by 35 by 30 nm??? (Different company has different process node names and so TSMC 7nm or N7 is not the same as Intel 7 or Samsung N7...) Wouldn't fault for all the confusion
Hallo Joe, I cant express enough how happy I am that you made this video. I am one of the 30 Mechanical Install Engineers at ASML that are responsible for the install and to make sure that everything regarding to the EUV machines works for our customers abroad such as Intel, TSMC and Samsung and I'll be going to Taiwan this Friday to install a machine. I'm so happy and proud that you made this video to highlight us, we are looking for a ton of people and would love more technical people. If you want to learn more about it please feel free and ask I'll be more then happy to answer any question. And within 2 years I'll also be doing the new EXE machine so the future is looking bright for us!!!!
There must be some SERIOUS headhunting going down against ASML. I mean, if they cant get at the tech via spying, then surely buying out a employer, techguy or manager would be almost as good?
@@Ooshgaar ASML is basically the best paying company in the Netherlands on almost every level within the company. I used to work at Philips, and ASML just calls you and offer you a job where you can work less and earn more. Only last September they hired 300 people in one month, and after that they hire about 100 new people every month or so, Its growing, and its growing FAST
Philips, inventor of the cd, is actually also a Dutch company. Global HQ in Amsterdam, but for more than a century (1891-1997) it was in Eindhoven - directly adjacent to Veldhoven where ASML is. I used to live in the old Philips HQ which was converted to lofts. Philips is a very interesting company you might wanna do a video on some day. ASML is a major employer in our region and one of the main reasons it’s now referred to as the ‘brainport region’. It’s also probably a key reason that rental prices have gone through the roof…
Philips is nowadays only an interesting company if you want to discuss stupid bussiness decisions from the past. It used to be at the forefront when it was still developing tech, like the cd. Those days are long past.
@@martijnspruit Maybe, but that’s kinda what I was referring to: its history. The total vertical integration in the ‘Forbidden City’ of Strijp etc. Also: why is my cat in your profile picture 😹
@@astralshore To answer your last question: because her unofficial twin sister has been lying on my couch for the main part of the evening. Her name is Wybertje.
@@mariacheebandidos7183 The technique already existed (and was indeed invented many years earlier by an American) but the cd-disc for music (and later the cd-rom for data) was invented and commercially brought by Philips and Japanese firm Sony. In fact, the reason a cd can hold 74 minutes of music, is because the ceo of Philips wanted to put an entire recording of Beethovens 9th symphony on a cd, and the particular version he liked was exactly 74 minutes long. So it's historically correct to say that Philips 'invented' the cd.
11:20 Texas Instruments is very much still a thing. They make very well-tested and predictable chips, their chip models will stay in production for a long time and a high percentage of their chips are automotive rated. These are mostly 'simpler' devices, analog amplifiers with low noise or low power needs, digital communication drivers, power supply regulators, etc. In many cases for my electrical engineering designs I can defend the choice to spend a few cents more to choose a TI part.
Just adding to the list TIs brushless dc motor driver chip used in the VESC a popular and often copied open hardware/open source speed controller for motors for personal electric vehicles or research robotics.
I know you generally stick with higher level overview of topics, but lithography is actually only one of the many steps in the process of making chips after cutting the wafers. I would love to see you explore the full process of chip manufacturing. Could be a very interesting video, or video series.
Even the process of making the wafers is pretty interesting, too. The process of creating a high-purity monocrystalline silicon ingot is pretty involved.
I concur asml is only one piece of the 330 processes that are needed to make your average chip. Is photo lithography important? absolutely but guess what Canon and Nikon were making photo lithography tools way before aslm. One of the things the manufacturers need to stop doing is chasing after Moore's law! everything we have today is fast enough and powerful enough for average use and yet we keep running after smaller and smaller nanometer metrics when they're not needed.
@@cclark3905 By downsizing, we get more performance from the same ammount of resources... at a lower energy cost. By getting eventually better perfomance from same material for less energy we are making everythiong more efficient while helping forward science and our capabilities as a species. That includes "average use." It's not really chasing Moore's law.. its progressing science. Because modern computers can do WAAAAYYY more for way less. Just put a first gen Xeon server CPU against the latest Ryzen Threadripper.. Compare their power and computational difference.. And then think about how much the progress in efficiency and speed are actually increasing their capability while saving time and money. Or your current gen best laptop or even smartphone CPU's could beat the living s*** out of the first multi-core processors in personal computing for power usage, performance AND material cost. Stagnation is the dumbest of all options!
I worked at ASML for many years and I love the atmosphere there! It has an entrepreneurial workforce who are always challenging themselves to push the technology beyond what should be possible. Amazing company!
I worked for ASML on contract for a few months in their plant in Connecticut. We were developing the reticle stage for the 2nd generation EUV machines (this was 2011). The tolerances on everything were crazy small. The reticle isn't even directly attached to the stage, because and pressure would warp it and destroy the focus. One of the crazier things I've worked on (and my list includes spacecraft, particle accelerators, and fusion reactors!). It was pretty cool stuff!
@@kashutosh9132 I'm an aerospace/mechanical engineer doing mostly design work. I worked for Boeing in late 90s on the Delta III and the International Space Station trusses. Then I worked at NASA for 10 years on various projects including ISS and Ares I. In 2010 there was a big shake-up and that's when I took the contract job at ASML. After that I ended up in Oak Ridge TN designing uranium processing equipment and had a side project designing instruments to measure gases in the plasma of the ITER fusion reactor. A few years later I took a job at Michigan State working on their new accelerator design (FRIB). I got laid off there due to personnel shuffling so went back to my old job on the uranium processing equipment, and when that design was done, I came back to NASA (where I am today) working on SLS and space habitats. I've been very fortunate to always find interesting work!
Im not sure if i missunderstood something, but at 7:54 u say the waver moves at 700mm/s which is faster then a accelerating fighter jet but when i convert it its 2,52 km/h or 1.57 mph.... But you are technically correct an "accelerating" fighter jet will reach that speed if it accelerates from a standstill. :)
Of course I heard of them - physical production of 90% of 3-5nm chips - TSMC of Taiwan (the other 10% is Samsung). _All_ lines for EUV lithography of those chips - ASML of The Netherlands. Reflective optics for those machines - Zeiss of Germany. Note the absence of the US, Japan or China? So, technically, three companies in the chain, none of which may fail, or we are toast. Not good.
Nah, EUV technology is patented by the US dept of energy. Also the whole laser/light exciter unit is made in the USA. ASML bought Cymer for and others for that purpose and kept large production and R&D facilities in the USA al part of a deal to use the EUV tech as licencee. You and the poster forgot to mention Trumpf, another German firm that makes the laser units.
To me the most interesting and clever aspect to micro electronics is how the individual components like transistors, resistors, diodes, etc. are created on a wafer of silicon by layering and then etching in particular patterns different semiconductors to create facsimiles of those components in microscopic scale.
@@ksks6802 Do they repair themselves or correct the errors? In other words is there redundancy with extra parts and error-correcting algorithms or does it repair the broken parts?
Nice video. I worked for Nikon for 16 years and ASML for 5. ASML used to be called the "most important company no ones heard of." Lithography is the closest thing to magic that exists. It may be physics, but not always physics we understand. It was always fun when I had customers complain that the machine was off by a half a nanometer and we needed to find out why and fix it.
Hi Joe, In the early 90's I used to work for a company that made "ashers", which would remove the photoresist layer from the wafer in between steps of building a multi-layered chip. We were only just starting to make machines that could handle the "new" (new then) 300mm wafers. Ahh Spice... The Spice must flow!
I worked for a firm (MEMC) that pulled those 300mm rods of 'perfect' silicon. They also performed all of the other steps that led to a final chip product (slicing, surface deposition, photomasking, etching, etc.), but seeing the entire process from start to finish is pretty spectacular! The future progress made with any of the new wafers has always been dependent upon the engineers / designers / fabricators of the machines and equipment that handle the rods and wafers of the larger sizes, interrupted by the continual discussions about whether or not we will continue to have an ample supple of carbon silicon to justify even making wafers that large. Just like one of the main laws of sociology being "All societal structures exist only to perpetuate themselves', the silicon technology (and every satellite industry that is dependent on it) is destined to see it's end. Enter paradigm shifts and quantum computing! Always the spice is right!
I've been a fan of yours for years. I always considered requesting you to make a video on ASML. ASML is the biggest tech company you've never heard of. And as an employee of ASML, I am very excited people are finally learning about the company that makes the technology we know of possible. Knowing what they do, it's always been a dream of mine to work for ASML. Thank you for the video Joe, this was amazing!
700mm/s (2.5 km/s or 1.6 mph): faster than an ACCELLERATING fighter jet. That's an amazingly misleading information in a technically correct way. At least he seemed to have overcome his metricphobia and said 'meter' in a video. Perhaps there's been other progress in the 3 years since I unsubbed. Anyone been around that long, also identified issues from that time that have improved? This is the 1st vid I've seen since.
It might be better if people didn't know. Bad things cant happen to things that people don't know about. I'm thinking of zealot's with an axe to grind. But yeah it is really a great thing to behold. I think it is terrible we live in a world where you have to worry about just the simple knowledge of something puts it in danger. This is the kind of thing the gov should censor maybe? Don't hang me for saying that.
"Ah, ignorance is bliss, what you don't know can't hurt y-" said a guy In Hiroshima, Japan just before an atomic warhead was detonated above his head. At least he was right: he probably felt no pain before being vaporized!
Another interesting fact that wasn't even mentioned is that the second largest player in the market for chip manufacturing machines is another Dutch company: ASMi (ASM International). They were the founders of the European chip manufacturing machine industry and their cooperation with Philips in the 1980's to focus on Litography eventually became ASML (hence the name ASM + Litography). But ASMi is still active on it's own and pretty much the second largest player in the market behind ASML for manufacturing machines for certain older/larger types of chips.
I am proud to work at ASML :D. Usually there is a saying there that goes as "ASML is the most important unknown company there is in the world." Nice to see this being covered by such a nice YT content creator. Also, Phillips is dutch as well.
Watching this video as I'm sitting in the cleanroom of building 4 of ASML. A few mistakes were made but hey, it's still mindblowing to see what we can accomplish :)
these kinds of videos always have a few errors. It's a super complicated sector! Joe did a great job overall. People that have worked in the industry often make similar mistakes so it's alright.
Apologies if this is an inane question, why is there a private computer in any of ASML's labs? Aren't a good portion of the corporate data breaches from private computers in proximity to company networks? Keep up the good work. Just a little concern, that's all.
@@ckl9390 Why would you need a private computer there? Access to the internet is possible from corporate ones... and people have breaks during the day.
@@MattRose30000 oh yes you're right there. Its like why are airplanes more safe to travel statistically than cars?! Because the plane carers and engineers don't skip anything and prepare everything to the letter every time following very precise protocols not skipping anything ever. Airplane accidents only happen nowadays when something unexpected that the original architects and engineer did not think of actually happens in reality. Cyber security is very tough nowadays but people give way. This is why a lot of the lower tier cybersecurity private certifications in IT that someone can obtain deal less with CLI skills like kali linux stuff and more like OSINT and becoming a "certified ethical hacker". Because that's how it starts. Find that private IP inside the company from an insider like a dumb employee not being careful because there is 0 chance of finding it through scanning from the outside or browsing google or TOR sites.
Just a small point of clarification, the "nm" of the technology is now very much more of a marketing term, the actual transistor sizes have somewhat plateaued in the dozens of nanometers. Der8auer has an excellent series of videos explaining as well as showing this with an electron microscope on intel 14nm as well as TSMC 7nm
This is (literally) not a small point! This video clearly shows how the marketing numbers (like "2nm") have actually fooled the public on the progress in this industry. I saw that Intel plans to continue this misleading naming convention through to "Angstrom" scale, which is just absurd.
Philips an American company? Last I checked Philips is very much a Dutch company as well, from the city of Eindhoven (ASML's Veldhoven is a neighboring town).
One of my most memorable moments at uni, being a computer nerd, was reading a book from the 80s, which posited a path to one micrometer. Anything beyond that was considered impossible. We're now around one-thousandth the feature size of that.
It is worth considering that the fab names stop representing the actual feature size a long time ago. IIRC the actual transistor sizes are still 10s or hundreds of nanometers even for the "3 nm" process node. This is also why there has been confusion as far as Intel's 10 nm and TSMC's 5 nm actually being about the same size.
@@danieljensen2626 that's a design choice though. How much do you need to amplify a signal, or drive for a given clock rate? The raw feature capability is still well beyond what the book on CMOS we had in the library told us was possible.
There's actually a really nice channel on youtube called "Asianometry" that covers all of the semiconductor stuff. He's Taiwanese and knows all sorts of interesting details about ASML and TSMC
asianometry is a fantastic channel with more in depth information on the semiconductor industry and the many complex steps in producing semiconductors (as well as other interesting topics)
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They also talk about Chinas efforts into the space, really interesting stuff.
Not only have I definitely heard of Netherlands based asml, but I lived in Eindhoven and have been to the campus many times delivering packages. My best mate lives there still and works for asml.
My Dad and I used to work for ASML and we made the reticle chucks that held the chips during manufacturing. The tolerances on those things were insane so I can fully understand how there’s no competition. So awesome to see a video talking about this company. I always have to give this lengthy explanation for the work that I used to do just because no one has ever heard of it. 👍
I thought Phillips is HQ'd in Amsterdam. Mo Chang (TSMC founder) got his start at Texas Instruments. During the time of the Taiwan Miracle, when Taiwan found a way to defeat that Dependency Theory and do their own thing. Beginning in the early 70s, Chiang Zhongzheng (Chiang Kai Shek) sent people into the world to learn and get experience, then return to Taiwan and start making things for themselves and the world. Ol' Joe should do a show on that!
I learned about ASML after joining Zeiss a few years ago. They have a learning site for mostly standard online coursework. When I started looking for other stuff that might interest me, I came across recordings of a Zeiss symposium on developments in semiconductor lithography. I had a physics background, and Zeiss likes bragging about how most transistors ever produced were made with the help of Zeiss optics, so I dared to dive in. The whole thing boggled my mind! When I first saw what wavelengths EUV technology is using, I could barely believe my eyes. You cannot use lenses with that kind of light because there is no material that is transparent to it. You can't even use simple mirrors! Joe points out the super high precision of these mirrors, but that's not the whole story: a simple mirror would not work because the EUV light would enter it and be absorbed. The mirrors they use have about 50 reflecting layers of super precisely tuned thickness (or thin-ness, if you will), so the parts of EUV light reflected by all those layers constructively interfere with each other. Most of the EUV light is still absorbed on its way to the wafer, but enough light gets through to make the process work. Of course, everything described happens in a hard vacuum. Then there is the creation of the EUV light by exploding 50,000 droplets of tin per second with lasers. The tin turns into plasma. But how does that plasma not cover the inside of the whole machine in a layer of tin when the plasma cools down and condenses? Just another one of an endless supply of engineering headscratchers which ASML solved - there is a secret scrubbing process, and I would bet there are magnetic fields involved, too. The resulting machines are so expensive that only a few of the world's chip-producing giants can afford them. And the way things are going, demands for computing power will continue to rise. How else are we going to carry supercomputers in our pockets and purses, enjoy ever better weather forecasts and AI-powered "personal assistants", and connect our brains to the metaverse?
In a telescope (astronomy), a refracting telescope has some advantages but one big problem is chromatic aberration where different colours have different focal lengths. Reflecting telescopes don't have this issue and this is one of the reasons that large telescopes are all mirrors. I assume the reason there is a similar issue with mirrors in these devices is you are not reflecting parallel rays of light (essentially the objects you are looking at are so far away that you are focusing on infinity) but in a lithography machine we are talking about relatively short distances (meters, or less).
@@wictimovgovonca320 This is why they need multiple mirrors instead of just one. The mirrors shape the light into a specific dipole pattern that enhances exposure contrast.
Hey Joe, I worked for Dallas Semiconductor (1992 -1993) finance department. Non of the tech stuff, however it was so cool to work for a tecj company back then. The company no longer exists, it was located in Addison, suburb if Dallas.
JIT manufacture was a significant contributor to the problem. Well not understanding that key components should be stocked at higher levels so if there were to be interruptions to supply... In particular components easily stored in mass quantities and also very cheap. Basically the cheapest parts held up manufacturing of cars.
@@EdBruceWRX Good point. China was a main supplier for low end chios. CoVid lockdowns and shipping troubles compounded with JIT (no stocks) to a perfect logistic storm.
The biggest problem is actually: Toyota developed a business practice called: just-in-time manufacturing. Which means: you need to have in-stock only those parts from supplies you need. Lots of companies around the world thought this meant: you don't need to have basically anything in-stock so when this time longer lasting problems happened, they couldn't produce. Because lots of parts are only produced in a few places around the world. The reason for that is specialization and cost: a chip factory costs 10s of billions to build. And even if a competing supplier exists, the company would need to redesign their own product to fit an other supplier. Both costly and time consuming. The funny thing is: Toyota was the last car manufacturer to run out of parts from their suppliers, because they knew what their own method meant.
Philips isn't headquartered in the US, it is also headquartered in the Netherlands. The reason why the US can ban them is probably that it could prevent them from accessing financial markets/selling to US companies/ US markets. Both companies have branches in the US.
@@PuntinoNero Apparently the bans work, since China has not been able to buy the high-end ASML machines. And, truth be told, if I was in charge of ASML I would be very hesitant to sell them one of these maches. Chine is not known for its protection of intellectual property. 😆
The reason the US can do this is because the EUV light source comes from a US company that was acquired by ASML (Cymer). This tech falls under the US export control laws, and hence the US government can limit that part of the technology. This is also why there are no restrictions for ASML on selling DUV machines to China, since there is no US-specific tech in those. All this goes pretty far. I work for ASML, and every time log in to our document system I have to legally declare in which country I reside, and this actually limits which documents I have access to.
I live close to the ASML HQ and have many friends and family who work there. Also Philips is as VOC as it can be. Another impressive Philips offspring is NXP
Companies like ASML use a lot of vendors to produce the various parts that go into these complex machines. The company where I worked for 20+ years supplied some subassemblies to the industry, ASML being one of our customers. Besides the machines mentioned in the article, there are other related machines, creating a lot of equipment used in the process of making chips. As mentioned, some camera companies are involved. Laser interferometry is used for more precise measurements and control of moving stages that the silicon substrates rest on. It is a truly amazing industry.
Been working there for almost 20 years. Started when PAS5500 slowly fased out, Twinscans were in proto stage. Time flies. Good short doc that encapsulates the story so far pretty well :D
I work for a company where we build tools for TSMC, Intel, Samsung, Sony, that fufill a few of the processes in the production of semi-conductor wafers. I work specifically on tools that do wet deposition. This video really connected so much loose information I've gathered through my experience there, so thanks Joe! Also, I've always wondered why we never produced photolithography tools, but this certainly answered that. As one of the commenters mentioned, it'd be cool to see a series exploring the entire process, because I'm just a lowly assembler and barely know what the tools that I work on actually do.
7:54 - Am I missing something? 700mm = .7 meters per second (~2 ft. 4 in.) = 2.5 km/h (1.5 mph). That's pretty fast for the nanoscale accuracy it needs, but I really don't think that's faster than an accelerating fighter jet unless you mean the first fraction of a fraction of a second when it's just starting to accelerate from 0.
Acceleration is not speed. It is how fast movement changes. Like G force. A jet fighter goes very fast and can develop powerful G forces. It still isn't as much as the acceleration of an X Y table. And yes the accelerations happen in fractions of a second.
@@1pcfred Yes, I realize all of that, but the measurement given was a speed, not an acceleration (there was no time measurement provided), so we can only judge the speed.
@@J624 acceleration is measured in distance in a period of time. Acceleration isn't the easiest thing to appreciate if you're not really invested into it. Acceleration is what really makes a CNC machine fast. There's rapid travel speed but how fast a machine can ramp is the impressive factor. Overcoming inertia is a difficult feat. Coming out of the hole. The whole bodies at rest and in motion deal.
The ASML machines don't actually "print" at 5 nanometers and soon to be 2 nm. These sizes used to relate directly to the precision of the laser but now it is mostly just marketing to reflect the effective density of the gates since they work in 3D now rather than on a 2D plane.
There are several videos on YT going much deeper into technical details of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV light coming from plasma generated by zapping droplets of molten tin midair - or rather midvacuum - with lasers) machines made by ASML and the reflective optics for those machines made by Zeiss. If you are into extreme technoporn, look for them - utterly fascinating.
ASML does lithography. Applied Materials, LAM Research, and Tokyo Electron build the machines that do all the depositions and etching. All four companies are equally important and critical to make semiconductors.
Yeah this idea that ASML is a monopoly is bunk. They have a monopoly on EUV which is not all lithography, it’s a new technology that is desirable but certainly not universal. For instance I don’t think intel is using much from ASML today. Nikon & Canon and other vendors make steppers which generally compete apparently, there’s just no other supplier for EUV.
@@alirobe commonly 'monopoly' refers to a single source of a product.. so yes, even if ASML is not extorting extra-profits from the market due to it's position it still is a monopoly. Monopolies per se are nothing bad anyway.. only if the competition is prevented from using the same tech to do the same stuff (patents, licenses, IP, etc. cough) the market can get into a condition that lets the monopolist control the supply and extract profits that way - those are called UNFREE.. eh, regulated markets, because the supply is not free to adjust to demand. It's kinda interesting that capitalism is based on free markets, competitive markets.. and yet we got those anti competitive frameworks in place that prevent free markets and instead creating a winner takes all environment, that gives capitalism a bad rep - while in actuality it's not the economic system that is at fault here but the political system and its enforcement of rules that benefit a few at the cost of the rest.
@@joansparky4439 They're not a monopoly. Monopoly doesn't mean "single source of a product" but single supplier for an entire category of products. Saying that ASML is a monopoly is a bit like saying Apple is a monopoly because they're the only people that sell iPhones. It ignores that there are other products too that directly compete in that space. Defining product categories so that they're really narrow and you can misleadingly label something a monopoly is just stupid.
You mentioned the necessary Zeiss mirrors. It would have been valuable additional information to mention, that these are also irreplacable for the production of modern chips. In a sense ASML could not produce a single machine without these Zeiss mirrors.
You mean having a monopoly is bad? All jokes aside I think people need to remember what happens when a single company controls or effectively controls an entire market, take Google or Amazon (online retail) or Walmart (traditional retail) for example. In the end its the people who pay: consumers, employees and shareholders. Here in the US there is a LOT of consolidation going on and it really should worry more people.
@@floridanews8786 Oh gosh I just can't wait to find any comment to spew my political beliefs all over, relevant or not, because its all balled up inside me. No one listens! HEAR ME WORLD I HAVE THINGS OF IMPORTANCE TO SAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wrong Philips you Googled. Philips is actually also a Dutch company, with its HQ in Amsterdam. The other Phillips (2 Ls) was an American Petroleum company.
I'm an electrical engineer from The Netherlands. I remember that some of my former co-students (end of last century) went forking for ADSL and sometimes mentioned some of the high-tech stuff they're doing. Like machines lavitating on air cushions, to reduce the influence of vibrations, like from passing trucks
I bought one of those Henson razors, it was so nice I bought one for my brother for his birthday and am planning to do so for my dad for Christmas. They are phenomenal a MUCH MUCH more enjoyable shave and I can shave my sensitive skin every day instead of every three days.
I'm more impressed that the tiny country is the number 2 supplier of agricultural foodstuffs in the world. Oh, wait. The Dutch government wants to kill that industry. Let the starving begin!
@Nilsfried Don't worry. You'll get there. The western world (Although probably not the US) will turn away from car based urban design and car use in general. So it's expected to see more public transit and bike infrastructure.
Just a note, there is an actual limit to how small they can go. Atoms are between 0.1 and 0.2 nm. You also need a certain number of Si atoms per each doping atom, right now it's about 600. So we're closing in on the limit of the miniaturization of silicon chips.
7:57: 700 mm/s = 0.7 m/s which is walking pace not fighter jet pace. Love my Henson razor that I bought after they last sponsored your video! Thank you!
You got it mostly correct, but it's important to understand the full Deposition (AMAT), Lithography (ASML), Etch (LAM and AMAT) cycle to appreciate structure creation. Just because you can print it doesn't necessarily mean you can etch it. It's also important to appreciate that EUV litho is not the only path sub nano lithography, it's just the most cost effective (even at $350m/each). The alternative technique is direct write e-beam. It can write anything at the width of an electron wavelength (insert your friendly discussion here if this is a wave or particle). This is exactly how the cold war's semiconductors race played out in the 80s. The Russians used e-beam and the West used lithography. Russians could make smaller, more advanced lines but they could not make volume. E-beam is horrendously slow, but good enough for an economy where only the military needs chips. Just FYI.....Any honest Semi engineer would tell you that Moore's law really stopped ~4-5 years ago around the 20nm node (for lateral density). The dirty secret is that while we continue to squeeze more and more transistors into the same area, the reality is that they all can't be "on" at the same time. Realistically only ~30% of them can be "on" at the same time or the chip overheats. The duty cycle is phased over the chip to keep it from melting, because if it were all "on" constantly you'd have the power density of the surface of the sun. So wrap you head around that for a minute.....Not only are you made of stardust, you have the sun in your pocket. What could stand in your way today?
@@scottbalak7123 Explains the whole 50% transistors increase but only getting 10-20% perf boost on a good day when it should be +40% with decent scaling. The efficiency gains are there though. tsmc 7nm vs 5nm base is about 50% higher transistor density and it has around 50% better power efficiency at same clocks zen 3 vs zen 4 if amd claims are true.
Awesome to see this being discussed in a video! Just a heads-up, the "5nm" etc is not the size of the transistors, but it's the size that it's possible to cut out the transistors' shapes.
The size is more of a naming scheme these days, it was really hard to make things smaller so they found ways around it that got a similar gain and then called it the smaller size.
@@uku4171 I've heard that Intel's 10nm and TSMC's 7nm are pretty comparable, even though TSMC is saying their features are 30% smaller. That could just be Intel's PR department pushing that retoric though.
I would argue the biggest tech company you've never heard of in the semiconductor world is actually Applied Materials, larger market cap than ASML ($26B vs $18B) and largest maker of semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Litho is super cool and absolutely critical but still only one step out of dozens even hundreds in making a chip.
The physical limits and necessity of using quantum tunneling has to do with the wavelength of an electron. That shows just how insane technology is getting. This was a problem being researched 25 years ago. The speed of a computer used to be tied to the clock speed, but now it's way more complicated.
When I first learned of how these machines generate the EUV light from the Asianometry channel, I could hardly believe THAT was the choice the engineers chose. It’s so bafflingly complicated, yet impressive.
Off topic of the video, but pertaining to your sponsor. Love the thing. Works great and I haven't had razor burn since I started using it. Took a while to get the form down because it's totally different than a multi blade razor, but once you get figure it out, it's wonderful.
When I worked in the old Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector (that was eventually spun out into Freescale), we called those boule cylinders boule-oni. ... you know... because of it's shape... never mind.
The majority of chips actually don't go through the EUV process that ASML basically owns. Most chips don't require technology that small. There are still plenty of 8" fabs still making "old" tech for use in cars, medical equipment, etc.
Yeah, but also I don't think a lot of new plants like that are being build. The reason is simple: companies like to make sure they can produce the high-end and then later use those machines to produce the old chips. Thus not having to invest in new machines. As I understand it this is actually part of the reason the high demand for less advanced chips can't be satisfied. Nobody (or not enough companies) is willing to buy older technology machines to build cheap mass-market chips. Because those machines are still expensive and the mass production of cheap chips doesn't pay back enough to allow that investment.
I would always see ASML at career fairs. I didn't know what they did but loved their banner that read, "Your tech company's favorite tech company". When I learned about what they did last year that banner made sense and I was surprised to learn of their importance in the market.
@Joe, Texas Instruments is *very much* a behemoth in the semiconductor industry. If you've bought a decent quality consumer electronics good this year, 50% chance of having one or more TI chips in it. They make a huge range of chips like basic industrial processors, wireless SoCs, huge analog market (ADC, op-amps, comparators). Tons of stuff in the power supply space. TI is awesome.
I am a semiconductor Equipment Engineer working at Nexperia Newport (yes the one the UK government are trying to shut down! 🤬) Photolithography is just one step in many many different steps to complete and populate a semiconductor wafer. It typically works in cycles of deposition, photolithography and etch (massive over simplification there!). These go through multiple machines made by multiple manufacturers. It can take several months and hundreds of individual processes to complete a single wafer. The wafer is then diced up into the individual devices before going onto the final stages of packaging etc. They're then sold on to the companies that fit them into the devices that use them, such as toys, toasters to smartphones and computers. Its he most important industry that people know the least about! :P
@@Yo-ItsYo you’re absolutely right of course. Please excuse my sarcastic frustration there! We as a workforce are extremely unhappy with this situation and very much want to stay with Nexperia. They have been amazing to us and invested millions upon millions into our site! We absolutely do not agree with the government’s reasons for the divestment order. They’re based on half truths, what if’s and not the facts on the ground.
I have to correct you: Koninklijke Philips N.V. (lit. 'Royal Philips'), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters is still in Eindhoven. I'm Dutch and proud about these light-bulb makers :)
I was waiting in line to purchase my monthly bus ticket a few days ago, and there were this dude and this girl in front of me chatting about existential questions and other stuff. The girl then recommended your channel to the dude. It was the first time I found a fellow enjoyer of your content irl. I regret that I didn't introduce myself 🙁
Texas Instruments has a huge facility in Dallas that is locked down. Whatever they make in there is used for defense contracts. They run 24/7 and have a lot of people working there.
I work in the footprint of an old Motorola chap fab plant. Part of the reason they chose the location was that Moto paid to be wired into the grid from two different substations from two different power companies. It made the local site considered to be basically the most resilient in the entire country.
Yeah, what's up with that? For our special needs friends from over the pond - it's 2ft 4in per second. I mean - I'm not even sure it's enough for a fixed-wing flight. It can't be 700 megameters/sec, right? That'd be ridiculous.
I like the video, but it has a few missconceptions: 1 - They can't t get the silicon for chip manufacturing from beaches or normal sand (just too bad mixture of other elements too hard to purify), they get it from pulverised Quartz rocks. I guess you could say "Quartz sand", but just saying "sand" while showing a normal beach is missleading 2 - Moore's law doesn't say "doubling the number of transistor every year" as said in the video, but roughly every TWO years. 3 - No planned transistor is based on picometer technology, that is just a marketing name because they have exhausted "nanometer" scale in the marketing department (but we are far from that in manufacturing). The reality is that the next generation transistors (aka "2 nanometer" in marketing terms )will still be hundreds of nanometers in physical size, with the smallest distinguishable details made with a precision in the order of tens of nanometers. 4 - The recent chip shortages had nothing to do with the company doing those machines, but primarily due to unexpected excess demand and secondly due to covid restrictions and a fire accident in a TSMC factory. Regarding the machines ASML have fullfilled all the orders, and BTW if you want more chips it is the factories what takes several years to build (4), not the machines. 5 - The Quantum Tunnel effect is not an undesirable effect but the base of the technology. Chip tansistors work by using quantum tunneling to make the gate conductive.
11:20 Texas Instruments is still huge in boring stuff like mosfets and various other power supply related semiconductors. If you design anything power supply related you know that. When I needed a linear regulator with 10v maximum input and a 200mv or less dropout for a design I found TI was literally the only company that made such a thing (TPS767).
I can see why there's only 1 company because, as you said, it's REALLY difficult but any company having a monopoly concerns me let alone a company that makes something as vital as this. But Scotland won't be making them any time soon so we will be relying on others anyway whether we are still in the UK in the future or not lol
ARM is UK, which is nearly in all mobile devices, TVs, etc. They don't manufacture but sell licences to companies like Qualcomm. They obviously have the capability, so it's just not difficulty but business model. Also selling off key companies to the likes of China, I can assure that there are insidious political agendas. Read the signs, many monopolies are no accident.
@@Clickathon ah ok that's interesting, thanks for that info 👍 and yeah, many monopolies are no accident-id go as far saying most are no accident Edit-and far as selling off things, unfortunately Westminster has a habit of doing that or enabling it, take oil for example and the UK compared to Norway-Westminster privatised the lot and Norway kept most of it in state hands and now they are much better off for it-around £400 billion better off I was reading recently. There's a very problematic bubble around London and it's causing other areas of the UK to suffer. Again thanks for that info!
only way other company like that emerges is when people from that company start another one. they have the know how in the field, contacts on people. and why would you start your own company? for money and willing to do it differently make yourself a name. ..... but mostly the vision of money. so if they are paid well for the work and the and the "climate in the office" is acceptable....why leave.
Electrical engineer in the chips Industry Very good explanation joe. People don’t seem to realize how inbred the hardware industry is. Not just where the silicon comes from and how it’s made and formed, but also how often people change companies. If you meet another chip engineer, they likely also worked at a few other big tech companies. It’s a big industry in terms of money, but very small in terms of people. Another thing people need to know is that this stuff takes time. If you buy a new chip today, it was probably first designed about 2-3 years ago. The whole tapeout (manufacturing) process takes a long time. Anyway, great video!
"it's probably not something you think about much" ordered my phone in early November, expected delivery mid-February.. I am always thinking about this!
Joe, about Philips being headquartered in the USA... Philips & Co was founded in 1891 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, by Frederik Philips and his son, Gerard. Check their wiki and it will also tell you they are headquartered in Amsterdam.
Another thing besides leading edge high performance chips is the shortage of older fabrication nodes, like 28 nanometer and 65 nanometer parts. The individual components of those chips are better suited for applications like automotive control systems because the internals are larger sized and more resistant to heat, vibration and static electricity. These were the parts keeping nearly finished vehicles sitting on storage yards. And a crap ton of other everyday applications that older processes are best for. Most of these types are made with refurbished chip lithography equipment. There's going to have to be a big investment made in building new machines to keep making old chips soon. That's not going to be cheap either.
I wanted to request a video on this but I was too for a patreon membership :( I live in The Netherlands and I had an entire paragraph in geography class that was dedicated to ASML, I did know a lot about them before that tho, maybe one thing you could make another video on is the German company Zeiss, which is the company that makes those mirrors. ASML is the biggest customer of Zeiss I believe which is also very interesting
Basically the transistor gate is so small that enough electrons tunnel through it even when the transistor is "off" that a charge can be read on the other side, causing errors. I'd be really interested in learning about how they're combatting this, there's only so much you can do in 5nm of space
Small correction: The node is called "5nm" but that is just the name, the gates itself are still 51nm long. 4n, 6n etc. are also just node names not the size. They lost the ability to name the node after the size 10 years ago.
You’ve got me curious how manufacturers claim to target picoscale density, when the size of a silicon atom is 0.2nm and it takes several atoms to make a transistor. A brief search of the Web didn’t show any official information, but I see the general public’s claims for the “limit” of how small we can get has shrunk over the past decade.
The 'nm' and 'pm' scale they talk about now is not actually measuring the size of anything the way that it used to. It's purely marketing down, and is just about the density of transistors, not their size.
They make a TON of chips. I’ve been getting into custom PCB design and have all sorts of critical smaller stuff. I’m using one of their boost converter chips in my newest design. 🙂
TI spilt out the military business in the early 2000s if I recall. I was a UK based TIer on the semiconductor side from 1997 to 2006 - a great company to work for.
I know this is late to the game, but ASML is just the litho process (making photo masks). I used to work at Hitachi back in the 90's, and they made the plasma etching machines that actually make the chips via the photo masks laid down by the ASML.
As many of you can probably tell, I am not an expert in this subject. If there's anything to add or anything I got wrong, let me know here in the comments (like I could stop you).
EDIT:
As many, MANY comments have pointed out - and rightfully so - I was wrong about Phillips being based in the US. This was a misreading on my part.
The details are that Phillips and several other companies came together to form a consortium in 1997 to develop the EUV technology, and since many of those companies were in the US, they formed an LLC based in the US, which is why the US holds sway when it comes to EUV tech.
I was trying to trim the fat on the script and cut out the details about the LLC, but in the process mistakenly assumed Phillips was in the US.
So yeah, my bad on that one.
The bible account is just mythological account based on the idea of the Golem , a clay statue with the right word written onto it comes to life , mud, clay etc is the wording used... Had the bible said silicon I might have been impressed ..
Hey Joe, a nominal correction, the process order i.e. "5nm" or "2nm" does not mean what people think it means. For more than a decade now the numbers have just been used arbitrarily to indicate "this one is better" and don't actually represent the size or density of transistors on the dies.
Hi Joe,
ASML is indeed a very key player in the manufacturing of the cutting edge of semiconductors but just to be clear other companies are in the space such as Nikon and Canon, both Japanese companies. They are not at the cutting edge, but are alternatives.
If you want to do more research on these companies yourself you can check out a fellow educational TH-camr "Asianometry", on pretty much everything related to semiconductor manufacturing, from silicon ingots to packaging technology and more. You might've seen him during research of this video.
ASML is closer to a system integrator like Boeing, rather than being vertically integrated. The optics they use are from Zeiss, a German optics company with a rich history in precision optics. ASML has hundreds of suppliers for the many parts that go into their machines, as it is not economical nor flexible to engage in cutting edge technology.
If you do a follow up at all it would be prudent to dig into the details.
I could have sworn Hyundai corporation is involved in wafer production? Also I am outdated , but didn't we already max out on the number of n-gates before the signal started bleeding through the walls, like in the early 90's they couldn't make the chip smaller for this reason so speed was snagged until they started using ALIASING 2X, Quad whatever comes next NO?
I definitely recommend you look into Asianometry here on TH-cam! They explain lithography stuff pretty nicely!
And as for around 4:30, the 5 nanometres and 2 nanometres thing is the "process node". The name of the process of making the chips, they don't mean the actual size of the transistor gates. Ever since around 100nm the size has long since detached from the process node name.
iirc 7nm is around 45 by 35 by 30 nm??? (Different company has different process node names and so TSMC 7nm or N7 is not the same as Intel 7 or Samsung N7...)
Wouldn't fault for all the confusion
Hallo Joe, I cant express enough how happy I am that you made this video. I am one of the 30 Mechanical Install Engineers at ASML that are responsible for the install and to make sure that everything regarding to the EUV machines works for our customers abroad such as Intel, TSMC and Samsung and I'll be going to Taiwan this Friday to install a machine. I'm so happy and proud that you made this video to highlight us, we are looking for a ton of people and would love more technical people. If you want to learn more about it please feel free and ask I'll be more then happy to answer any question. And within 2 years I'll also be doing the new EXE machine so the future is looking bright for us!!!!
Hya colleague, I'm in tooling development! :D
Hey, uh, I can... I can do basic Windows shit. I speak English, have a very basic understanding of German, and like beer.
There must be some SERIOUS headhunting going down against ASML. I mean, if they cant get at the tech via spying, then surely buying out a employer, techguy or manager would be almost as good?
@@Ooshgaar ASML is basically the best paying company in the Netherlands on almost every level within the company. I used to work at Philips, and ASML just calls you and offer you a job where you can work less and earn more. Only last September they hired 300 people in one month, and after that they hire about 100 new people every month or so, Its growing, and its growing FAST
@@xisthNB Sup man, guess we´ll see eachother in building 7!! if they ever have space that is xD
Philips, inventor of the cd, is actually also a Dutch company. Global HQ in Amsterdam, but for more than a century (1891-1997) it was in Eindhoven - directly adjacent to Veldhoven where ASML is. I used to live in the old Philips HQ which was converted to lofts. Philips is a very interesting company you might wanna do a video on some day.
ASML is a major employer in our region and one of the main reasons it’s now referred to as the ‘brainport region’. It’s also probably a key reason that rental prices have gone through the roof…
Philips is nowadays only an interesting company if you want to discuss stupid bussiness decisions from the past. It used to be at the forefront when it was still developing tech, like the cd. Those days are long past.
@@martijnspruit Maybe, but that’s kinda what I was referring to: its history. The total vertical integration in the ‘Forbidden City’ of Strijp etc. Also: why is my cat in your profile picture 😹
@@astralshore To answer your last question: because her unofficial twin sister has been lying on my couch for the main part of the evening. Her name is Wybertje.
nope, the optical disk was invented by an American. philips just licensed the pattern and used it to develop the cd.
@@mariacheebandidos7183 The technique already existed (and was indeed invented many years earlier by an American) but the cd-disc for music (and later the cd-rom for data) was invented and commercially brought by Philips and Japanese firm Sony. In fact, the reason a cd can hold 74 minutes of music, is because the ceo of Philips wanted to put an entire recording of Beethovens 9th symphony on a cd, and the particular version he liked was exactly 74 minutes long. So it's historically correct to say that Philips 'invented' the cd.
11:20 Texas Instruments is very much still a thing. They make very well-tested and predictable chips, their chip models will stay in production for a long time and a high percentage of their chips are automotive rated. These are mostly 'simpler' devices, analog amplifiers with low noise or low power needs, digital communication drivers, power supply regulators, etc. In many cases for my electrical engineering designs I can defend the choice to spend a few cents more to choose a TI part.
Probably sarcasm, Joe lives by Dallas
They just opened Wolf Speed here in mid state NY. It's the largest microchip clean room in the country.
Just adding to the list TIs brushless dc motor driver chip used in the VESC a popular and often copied open hardware/open source speed controller for motors for personal electric vehicles or research robotics.
ti calculator for life!!!!!!!
@@nathansmith8883 and it doubles as a gameboy, who could ask for more?
I know you generally stick with higher level overview of topics, but lithography is actually only one of the many steps in the process of making chips after cutting the wafers. I would love to see you explore the full process of chip manufacturing. Could be a very interesting video, or video series.
Even the process of making the wafers is pretty interesting, too. The process of creating a high-purity monocrystalline silicon ingot is pretty involved.
Just go watch Asianometry :P
@@PinataOblongata I am an engineer at Intel, I don't need the explanation. Just think it would be fun to have my part of the job shown off more. XD
I concur asml is only one piece of the 330 processes that are needed to make your average chip.
Is photo lithography important? absolutely but guess what Canon and Nikon were making photo lithography tools way before aslm.
One of the things the manufacturers need to stop doing is chasing after Moore's law! everything we have today is fast enough and powerful enough for average use and yet we keep running after smaller and smaller nanometer metrics when they're not needed.
@@cclark3905 By downsizing, we get more performance from the same ammount of resources... at a lower energy cost.
By getting eventually better perfomance from same material for less energy we are making everythiong more efficient while helping forward science and our capabilities as a species. That includes "average use."
It's not really chasing Moore's law.. its progressing science. Because modern computers can do WAAAAYYY more for way less.
Just put a first gen Xeon server CPU against the latest Ryzen Threadripper.. Compare their power and computational difference.. And then think about how much the progress in efficiency and speed are actually increasing their capability while saving time and money.
Or your current gen best laptop or even smartphone CPU's could beat the living s*** out of the first multi-core processors in personal computing for power usage, performance AND material cost.
Stagnation is the dumbest of all options!
I worked at ASML for many years and I love the atmosphere there! It has an entrepreneurial workforce who are always challenging themselves to push the technology beyond what should be possible. Amazing company!
How did you get hired?
@@batmeme9349 as a contractor via TMC Netherlands.
@@markrobinsontraining cool
I worked for ASML on contract for a few months in their plant in Connecticut. We were developing the reticle stage for the 2nd generation EUV machines (this was 2011). The tolerances on everything were crazy small. The reticle isn't even directly attached to the stage, because and pressure would warp it and destroy the focus. One of the crazier things I've worked on (and my list includes spacecraft, particle accelerators, and fusion reactors!). It was pretty cool stuff!
What is your portfolio sir
This is an insane body of work(you listed)
@@kashutosh9132 I'm an aerospace/mechanical engineer doing mostly design work. I worked for Boeing in late 90s on the Delta III and the International Space Station trusses. Then I worked at NASA for 10 years on various projects including ISS and Ares I. In 2010 there was a big shake-up and that's when I took the contract job at ASML. After that I ended up in Oak Ridge TN designing uranium processing equipment and had a side project designing instruments to measure gases in the plasma of the ITER fusion reactor. A few years later I took a job at Michigan State working on their new accelerator design (FRIB). I got laid off there due to personnel shuffling so went back to my old job on the uranium processing equipment, and when that design was done, I came back to NASA (where I am today) working on SLS and space habitats.
I've been very fortunate to always find interesting work!
@@jamesowens7176
Wow
This is truly amazing
Im not sure if i missunderstood something, but at 7:54 u say the waver moves at 700mm/s which is faster then a accelerating fighter jet but when i convert it its 2,52 km/h or 1.57 mph....
But you are technically correct an "accelerating" fighter jet will reach that speed if it accelerates from a standstill. :)
Of course I heard of them - physical production of 90% of 3-5nm chips - TSMC of Taiwan (the other 10% is Samsung). _All_ lines for EUV lithography of those chips - ASML of The Netherlands. Reflective optics for those machines - Zeiss of Germany. Note the absence of the US, Japan or China?
So, technically, three companies in the chain, none of which may fail, or we are toast. Not good.
Unless you accept that Taiwan _is_ China.
Not toast, just have to make do with the vast abundance we already have. Oh no.
Trumpf for EUV laser.
Cymer, which was a US company then bought by ASML, produces DUV laser.
@@johnkesich8696 Taiwan will self destruct the factories before falling to China :D
Nah, EUV technology is patented by the US dept of energy. Also the whole laser/light exciter unit is made in the USA. ASML bought Cymer for and others for that purpose and kept large production and R&D facilities in the USA al part of a deal to use the EUV tech as licencee. You and the poster forgot to mention Trumpf, another German firm that makes the laser units.
To me the most interesting and clever aspect to micro electronics is how the individual components like transistors, resistors, diodes, etc. are created on a wafer of silicon by layering and then etching in particular patterns different semiconductors to create facsimiles of those components in microscopic scale.
CPUs can actually repair themselves as well. Interesting delve if you have the time.
@@ksks6802 Do you have a link or reference to the topic?
I have a thesaurus too
@@ksks6802 yeah I wanna hear about this too
@@ksks6802 Do they repair themselves or correct the errors? In other words is there redundancy with extra parts and error-correcting algorithms or does it repair the broken parts?
Nice video. I worked for Nikon for 16 years and ASML for 5. ASML used to be called the "most important company no ones heard of." Lithography is the closest thing to magic that exists. It may be physics, but not always physics we understand. It was always fun when I had customers complain that the machine was off by a half a nanometer and we needed to find out why and fix it.
Hi Joe, In the early 90's I used to work for a company that made "ashers", which would remove the photoresist layer from the wafer in between steps of building a multi-layered chip.
We were only just starting to make machines that could handle the "new" (new then) 300mm wafers.
Ahh Spice... The Spice must flow!
I worked for a firm (MEMC) that pulled those 300mm rods of 'perfect' silicon. They also performed all of the other steps that led to a final chip product (slicing, surface deposition, photomasking, etching, etc.), but seeing the entire process from start to finish is pretty spectacular! The future progress made with any of the new wafers has always been dependent upon the engineers / designers / fabricators of the machines and equipment that handle the rods and wafers of the larger sizes, interrupted by the continual discussions about whether or not we will continue to have an ample supple of carbon silicon to justify even making wafers that large. Just like one of the main laws of sociology being "All societal structures exist only to perpetuate themselves', the silicon technology (and every satellite industry that is dependent on it) is destined to see it's end. Enter paradigm shifts and quantum computing! Always the spice is right!
Ancient history.
I've been a fan of yours for years. I always considered requesting you to make a video on ASML.
ASML is the biggest tech company you've never heard of.
And as an employee of ASML, I am very excited people are finally learning about the company that makes the technology we know of possible. Knowing what they do, it's always been a dream of mine to work for ASML.
Thank you for the video Joe, this was amazing!
Raj Kumar: Areh yaaaarrr! Toom mungta nuclear bomb keh target baneh aur kiyah salaaaaah!!
700mm/s (2.5 km/s or 1.6 mph): faster than an ACCELLERATING fighter jet. That's an amazingly misleading information in a technically correct way.
At least he seemed to have overcome his metricphobia and said 'meter' in a video. Perhaps there's been other progress in the 3 years since I unsubbed. Anyone been around that long, also identified issues from that time that have improved? This is the 1st vid I've seen since.
It might be better if people didn't know. Bad things cant happen to things that people don't know about. I'm thinking of zealot's with an axe to grind. But yeah it is really a great thing to behold. I think it is terrible we live in a world where you have to worry about just the simple knowledge of something puts it in danger. This is the kind of thing the gov should censor maybe? Don't hang me for saying that.
"Ah, ignorance is bliss, what you don't know can't hurt y-" said a guy In Hiroshima, Japan just before an atomic warhead was detonated above his head. At least he was right: he probably felt no pain before being vaporized!
Where's the tech monopoly laws
Another interesting fact that wasn't even mentioned is that the second largest player in the market for chip manufacturing machines is another Dutch company: ASMi (ASM International). They were the founders of the European chip manufacturing machine industry and their cooperation with Philips in the 1980's to focus on Litography eventually became ASML (hence the name ASM + Litography). But ASMi is still active on it's own and pretty much the second largest player in the market behind ASML for manufacturing machines for certain older/larger types of chips.
I am proud to work at ASML :D. Usually there is a saying there that goes as "ASML is the most important unknown company there is in the world."
Nice to see this being covered by such a nice YT content creator.
Also, Phillips is dutch as well.
Watching this video as I'm sitting in the cleanroom of building 4 of ASML. A few mistakes were made but hey, it's still mindblowing to see what we can accomplish :)
these kinds of videos always have a few errors. It's a super complicated sector! Joe did a great job overall. People that have worked in the industry often make similar mistakes so it's alright.
Apologies if this is an inane question, why is there a private computer in any of ASML's labs? Aren't a good portion of the corporate data breaches from private computers in proximity to company networks?
Keep up the good work. Just a little concern, that's all.
@@ckl9390 Why would you need a private computer there? Access to the internet is possible from corporate ones... and people have breaks during the day.
@@ckl9390 you are more likely to get trojans through corporate mail than by watching a youtube video.
@@MattRose30000 oh yes you're right there. Its like why are airplanes more safe to travel statistically than cars?! Because the plane carers and engineers don't skip anything and prepare everything to the letter every time following very precise protocols not skipping anything ever. Airplane accidents only happen nowadays when something unexpected that the original architects and engineer did not think of actually happens in reality. Cyber security is very tough nowadays but people give way. This is why a lot of the lower tier cybersecurity private certifications in IT that someone can obtain deal less with CLI skills like kali linux stuff and more like OSINT and becoming a "certified ethical hacker". Because that's how it starts. Find that private IP inside the company from an insider like a dumb employee not being careful because there is 0 chance of finding it through scanning from the outside or browsing google or TOR sites.
Just a small point of clarification, the "nm" of the technology is now very much more of a marketing term, the actual transistor sizes have somewhat plateaued in the dozens of nanometers.
Der8auer has an excellent series of videos explaining as well as showing this with an electron microscope on intel 14nm as well as TSMC 7nm
This is (literally) not a small point! This video clearly shows how the marketing numbers (like "2nm") have actually fooled the public on the progress in this industry. I saw that Intel plans to continue this misleading naming convention through to "Angstrom" scale, which is just absurd.
Philips an American company? Last I checked Philips is very much a Dutch company as well, from the city of Eindhoven (ASML's Veldhoven is a neighboring town).
It is: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips
As a Dutchie, I was looking for this comment haha
@@r0bert852 Nah most definitely a Dutch company, atleast the founders of philips are dutch.
@@r0bert852 Since when does the USA have a Royal House that could give Philips its royal title?
Very dutch. Not even headquatered in the usa
One of my most memorable moments at uni, being a computer nerd, was reading a book from the 80s, which posited a path to one micrometer. Anything beyond that was considered impossible.
We're now around one-thousandth the feature size of that.
It is worth considering that the fab names stop representing the actual feature size a long time ago. IIRC the actual transistor sizes are still 10s or hundreds of nanometers even for the "3 nm" process node. This is also why there has been confusion as far as Intel's 10 nm and TSMC's 5 nm actually being about the same size.
@@danieljensen2626 that's a design choice though. How much do you need to amplify a signal, or drive for a given clock rate?
The raw feature capability is still well beyond what the book on CMOS we had in the library told us was possible.
"It keeps the wafer moving at 700mm/s. That is faster than an accelerating fighter jet" 7:50
Oh dear, hearing this hurts me physically
There's actually a really nice channel on youtube called "Asianometry" that covers all of the semiconductor stuff. He's Taiwanese and knows all sorts of interesting details about ASML and TSMC
+1 for Asianometry! Great channel.
Yes, awesome channel. Recommended!
asianometry is a fantastic channel with more in depth information on the semiconductor industry and the many complex steps in producing semiconductors (as well as other interesting topics)
They also talk about Chinas efforts into the space, really interesting stuff.
yah this sounds like a rip-off asianometry
Not only have I definitely heard of Netherlands based asml, but I lived in Eindhoven and have been to the campus many times delivering packages.
My best mate lives there still and works for asml.
My Dad and I used to work for ASML and we made the reticle chucks that held the chips during manufacturing. The tolerances on those things were insane so I can fully understand how there’s no competition. So awesome to see a video talking about this company. I always have to give this lengthy explanation for the work that I used to do just because no one has ever heard of it. 👍
Seeing a video about the company I work at after watching you for years is kind of a cool feeling :)
I thought Phillips is HQ'd in Amsterdam.
Mo Chang (TSMC founder) got his start at Texas Instruments. During the time of the Taiwan Miracle, when Taiwan found a way to defeat that Dependency Theory and do their own thing. Beginning in the early 70s, Chiang Zhongzheng (Chiang Kai Shek) sent people into the world to learn and get experience, then return to Taiwan and start making things for themselves and the world.
Ol' Joe should do a show on that!
I learned about ASML after joining Zeiss a few years ago. They have a learning site for mostly standard online coursework. When I started looking for other stuff that might interest me, I came across recordings of a Zeiss symposium on developments in semiconductor lithography. I had a physics background, and Zeiss likes bragging about how most transistors ever produced were made with the help of Zeiss optics, so I dared to dive in.
The whole thing boggled my mind! When I first saw what wavelengths EUV technology is using, I could barely believe my eyes. You cannot use lenses with that kind of light because there is no material that is transparent to it. You can't even use simple mirrors! Joe points out the super high precision of these mirrors, but that's not the whole story: a simple mirror would not work because the EUV light would enter it and be absorbed. The mirrors they use have about 50 reflecting layers of super precisely tuned thickness (or thin-ness, if you will), so the parts of EUV light reflected by all those layers constructively interfere with each other. Most of the EUV light is still absorbed on its way to the wafer, but enough light gets through to make the process work.
Of course, everything described happens in a hard vacuum.
Then there is the creation of the EUV light by exploding 50,000 droplets of tin per second with lasers. The tin turns into plasma. But how does that plasma not cover the inside of the whole machine in a layer of tin when the plasma cools down and condenses? Just another one of an endless supply of engineering headscratchers which ASML solved - there is a secret scrubbing process, and I would bet there are magnetic fields involved, too.
The resulting machines are so expensive that only a few of the world's chip-producing giants can afford them. And the way things are going, demands for computing power will continue to rise. How else are we going to carry supercomputers in our pockets and purses, enjoy ever better weather forecasts and AI-powered "personal assistants", and connect our brains to the metaverse?
In a telescope (astronomy), a refracting telescope has some advantages but one big problem is chromatic aberration where different colours have different focal lengths. Reflecting telescopes don't have this issue and this is one of the reasons that large telescopes are all mirrors. I assume the reason there is a similar issue with mirrors in these devices is you are not reflecting parallel rays of light (essentially the objects you are looking at are so far away that you are focusing on infinity) but in a lithography machine we are talking about relatively short distances (meters, or less).
@@wictimovgovonca320 This is why they need multiple mirrors instead of just one. The mirrors shape the light into a specific dipole pattern that enhances exposure contrast.
"connect our brains to the metaverse?"
Do you want Borg? Because that's how you get Borg.
Hey Joe, I worked for Dallas Semiconductor (1992 -1993) finance department. Non of the tech stuff, however it was so cool to work for a tecj company back then. The company no longer exists, it was located in Addison, suburb if Dallas.
My partner just asked why there was a shortage! How convenient that I have a video full of facts to show them!
Business partner or partner in crime?
JIT manufacture was a significant contributor to the problem. Well not understanding that key components should be stocked at higher levels so if there were to be interruptions to supply... In particular components easily stored in mass quantities and also very cheap. Basically the cheapest parts held up manufacturing of cars.
@@EdBruceWRX Good point. China was a main supplier for low end chios. CoVid lockdowns and shipping troubles compounded with JIT (no stocks) to a perfect logistic storm.
The biggest problem is actually: Toyota developed a business practice called: just-in-time manufacturing. Which means: you need to have in-stock only those parts from supplies you need. Lots of companies around the world thought this meant: you don't need to have basically anything in-stock so when this time longer lasting problems happened, they couldn't produce. Because lots of parts are only produced in a few places around the world. The reason for that is specialization and cost: a chip factory costs 10s of billions to build. And even if a competing supplier exists, the company would need to redesign their own product to fit an other supplier. Both costly and time consuming. The funny thing is: Toyota was the last car manufacturer to run out of parts from their suppliers, because they knew what their own method meant.
@Dave Duncan Haha, my partner in crime and life.
Philips isn't headquartered in the US, it is also headquartered in the Netherlands. The reason why the US can ban them is probably that it could prevent them from accessing financial markets/selling to US companies/ US markets. Both companies have branches in the US.
ASML has signifact production and research facilities in the USA.
@@hendman4083 yeah. They also have research and production facilities in China. So I wonder how enforceable the technology-teansfer bans are.
@@PuntinoNero Apparently the bans work, since China has not been able to buy the high-end ASML machines. And, truth be told, if I was in charge of ASML I would be very hesitant to sell them one of these maches. Chine is not known for its protection of intellectual property. 😆
@@hendman4083 makes sense. Probably the ban is very specific to machine models/components.
The reason the US can do this is because the EUV light source comes from a US company that was acquired by ASML (Cymer). This tech falls under the US export control laws, and hence the US government can limit that part of the technology. This is also why there are no restrictions for ASML on selling DUV machines to China, since there is no US-specific tech in those. All this goes pretty far. I work for ASML, and every time log in to our document system I have to legally declare in which country I reside, and this actually limits which documents I have access to.
I live close to the ASML HQ and have many friends and family who work there. Also Philips is as VOC as it can be. Another impressive Philips offspring is NXP
Companies like ASML use a lot of vendors to produce the various parts that go into these complex machines. The company where I worked for 20+ years supplied some subassemblies to the industry, ASML being one of our customers.
Besides the machines mentioned in the article, there are other related machines, creating a lot of equipment used in the process of making chips. As mentioned, some camera companies are involved. Laser interferometry is used for more precise measurements and control of moving stages that the silicon substrates rest on.
It is a truly amazing industry.
Been working there for almost 20 years. Started when PAS5500 slowly fased out, Twinscans were in proto stage. Time flies. Good short doc that encapsulates the story so far pretty well :D
Joe, you're always on the edge of information. Very educational. Everytime I watch, i learn something new and fascinating. Thanks as always!
I work for a company where we build tools for TSMC, Intel, Samsung, Sony, that fufill a few of the processes in the production of semi-conductor wafers. I work specifically on tools that do wet deposition. This video really connected so much loose information I've gathered through my experience there, so thanks Joe! Also, I've always wondered why we never produced photolithography tools, but this certainly answered that. As one of the commenters mentioned, it'd be cool to see a series exploring the entire process, because I'm just a lowly assembler and barely know what the tools that I work on actually do.
7:54 - Am I missing something? 700mm = .7 meters per second (~2 ft. 4 in.) = 2.5 km/h (1.5 mph). That's pretty fast for the nanoscale accuracy it needs, but I really don't think that's faster than an accelerating fighter jet unless you mean the first fraction of a fraction of a second when it's just starting to accelerate from 0.
Acceleration is not speed. It is how fast movement changes. Like G force. A jet fighter goes very fast and can develop powerful G forces. It still isn't as much as the acceleration of an X Y table. And yes the accelerations happen in fractions of a second.
@@1pcfred Yes, I realize all of that, but the measurement given was a speed, not an acceleration (there was no time measurement provided), so we can only judge the speed.
@@J624 acceleration is measured in distance in a period of time. Acceleration isn't the easiest thing to appreciate if you're not really invested into it. Acceleration is what really makes a CNC machine fast. There's rapid travel speed but how fast a machine can ramp is the impressive factor. Overcoming inertia is a difficult feat. Coming out of the hole. The whole bodies at rest and in motion deal.
The ASML machines don't actually "print" at 5 nanometers and soon to be 2 nm. These sizes used to relate directly to the precision of the laser but now it is mostly just marketing to reflect the effective density of the gates since they work in 3D now rather than on a 2D plane.
I see them more as printers than 3D printers.
There are several videos on YT going much deeper into technical details of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV light coming from plasma generated by zapping droplets of molten tin midair - or rather midvacuum - with lasers) machines made by ASML and the reflective optics for those machines made by Zeiss. If you are into extreme technoporn, look for them - utterly fascinating.
'asianometry' has plenty of info like that
@@joansparky4439 Yes - thanks. I saw others, but those are probably the best.
Never assume we are getting bored or overwhelmed, your explanations are amazingly interesting and easy to understand.
ASML does lithography.
Applied Materials, LAM Research, and Tokyo Electron build the machines that do all the depositions and etching.
All four companies are equally important and critical to make semiconductors.
My family friend is an electrical engineer that works for a chip maker here in utah. And wow is that process insane!
I've been in tech for 20 years, but had never heard of ASML. Super fascinating (equal parts impressive & eye opening)!
Really?? Asml isn't popular but when it comes to chip technology they are a monopoly.
Yeah this idea that ASML is a monopoly is bunk. They have a monopoly on EUV which is not all lithography, it’s a new technology that is desirable but certainly not universal. For instance I don’t think intel is using much from ASML today. Nikon & Canon and other vendors make steppers which generally compete apparently, there’s just no other supplier for EUV.
@@alirobe commonly 'monopoly' refers to a single source of a product.. so yes, even if ASML is not extorting extra-profits from the market due to it's position it still is a monopoly. Monopolies per se are nothing bad anyway.. only if the competition is prevented from using the same tech to do the same stuff (patents, licenses, IP, etc. cough) the market can get into a condition that lets the monopolist control the supply and extract profits that way - those are called UNFREE.. eh, regulated markets, because the supply is not free to adjust to demand.
It's kinda interesting that capitalism is based on free markets, competitive markets.. and yet we got those anti competitive frameworks in place that prevent free markets and instead creating a winner takes all environment, that gives capitalism a bad rep - while in actuality it's not the economic system that is at fault here but the political system and its enforcement of rules that benefit a few at the cost of the rest.
Even many people in the Netherlands have no idea the most important company in the world is in their country.
@@joansparky4439 They're not a monopoly. Monopoly doesn't mean "single source of a product" but single supplier for an entire category of products. Saying that ASML is a monopoly is a bit like saying Apple is a monopoly because they're the only people that sell iPhones. It ignores that there are other products too that directly compete in that space. Defining product categories so that they're really narrow and you can misleadingly label something a monopoly is just stupid.
You mentioned the necessary Zeiss mirrors. It would have been valuable additional information to mention, that these are also irreplacable for the production of modern chips. In a sense ASML could not produce a single machine without these Zeiss mirrors.
Mate you really brought it all into the light with the info particularly the Taiwan factor.
Really great presentation. Well done.
You mean having a monopoly is bad? All jokes aside I think people need to remember what happens when a single company controls or effectively controls an entire market, take Google or Amazon (online retail) or Walmart (traditional retail) for example. In the end its the people who pay: consumers, employees and shareholders. Here in the US there is a LOT of consolidation going on and it really should worry more people.
No worries, Biden used to be an 18 wheeler.
@@floridanews8786 Oh gosh I just can't wait to find any comment to spew my political beliefs all over, relevant or not, because its all balled up inside me. No one listens! HEAR ME WORLD I HAVE THINGS OF IMPORTANCE TO SAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wrong Philips you Googled. Philips is actually also a Dutch company, with its HQ in Amsterdam.
The other Phillips (2 Ls) was an American Petroleum company.
this
"There's another O'Neil, with one 'L'. He's has no sense of humour at all."
I'm an electrical engineer from The Netherlands. I remember that some of my former co-students (end of last century) went forking for ADSL and sometimes mentioned some of the high-tech stuff they're doing. Like machines lavitating on air cushions, to reduce the influence of vibrations, like from passing trucks
I bought one of those Henson razors, it was so nice I bought one for my brother for his birthday and am planning to do so for my dad for Christmas. They are phenomenal a MUCH MUCH more enjoyable shave and I can shave my sensitive skin every day instead of every three days.
As a dutchie, im quite proud of ASML.
I'm more impressed that the tiny country is the number 2 supplier of agricultural foodstuffs in the world.
Oh, wait. The Dutch government wants to kill that industry. Let the starving begin!
@Nilsfried Don't worry. You'll get there. The western world (Although probably not the US) will turn away from car based urban design and car use in general. So it's expected to see more public transit and bike infrastructure.
ASML? Is that where somebody chews with their mouth open in front of a microphone?
@@simplethings3730 It's been a long time since I had lunch at an ASML breakroom. But I'm sure I didn't notice any Microphones.
@@pauldickhoff3594 Duh! That's because you can't even see them. \s
btw nice surname
Just a note, there is an actual limit to how small they can go. Atoms are between 0.1 and 0.2 nm. You also need a certain number of Si atoms per each doping atom, right now it's about 600. So we're closing in on the limit of the miniaturization of silicon chips.
7:57: 700 mm/s = 0.7 m/s which is walking pace not fighter jet pace.
Love my Henson razor that I bought after they last sponsored your video! Thank you!
Even if the number would have been 700m/s, you cannot compare velocity with acceleration
@@j--xe3ke True. But even then, 0.7 m/s with a precision of 5nm is pretty impressive.
@@SteelJM1 Oh, it is crazy impressive which is one of the many reasons outlined in the video that they have no competitors.
I knew there weren't a lot of different chip manufacturers but I had no idea the machines were all from one company. Very interesting stuff.
You got it mostly correct, but it's important to understand the full Deposition (AMAT), Lithography (ASML), Etch (LAM and AMAT) cycle to appreciate structure creation. Just because you can print it doesn't necessarily mean you can etch it. It's also important to appreciate that EUV litho is not the only path sub nano lithography, it's just the most cost effective (even at $350m/each). The alternative technique is direct write e-beam. It can write anything at the width of an electron wavelength (insert your friendly discussion here if this is a wave or particle). This is exactly how the cold war's semiconductors race played out in the 80s. The Russians used e-beam and the West used lithography. Russians could make smaller, more advanced lines but they could not make volume. E-beam is horrendously slow, but good enough for an economy where only the military needs chips. Just FYI.....Any honest Semi engineer would tell you that Moore's law really stopped ~4-5 years ago around the 20nm node (for lateral density). The dirty secret is that while we continue to squeeze more and more transistors into the same area, the reality is that they all can't be "on" at the same time. Realistically only ~30% of them can be "on" at the same time or the chip overheats. The duty cycle is phased over the chip to keep it from melting, because if it were all "on" constantly you'd have the power density of the surface of the sun. So wrap you head around that for a minute.....Not only are you made of stardust, you have the sun in your pocket. What could stand in your way today?
Could you provide sources for the claim that not all transistors are on at the same time?
@@descai10 The term is called "Dark Silicon". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_silicon
@@scottbalak7123 Explains the whole 50% transistors increase but only getting 10-20% perf boost on a good day when it should be +40% with decent scaling. The efficiency gains are there though. tsmc 7nm vs 5nm base is about 50% higher transistor density and it has around 50% better power efficiency at same clocks zen 3 vs zen 4 if amd claims are true.
@@scottbalak7123 Thanks.
@@descai10 See also: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling#Breakdown_of_Dennard_scaling_around_2006
Awesome to see this being discussed in a video! Just a heads-up, the "5nm" etc is not the size of the transistors, but it's the size that it's possible to cut out the transistors' shapes.
It's the size of the transistors in a 2d context. In reality the transistors are probably 10nm just stacked vertically 2,3,4 times
The size is more of a naming scheme these days, it was really hard to make things smaller so they found ways around it that got a similar gain and then called it the smaller size.
@@autohmae Do AMD and Intel measure it in the same way?
@@uku4171 it's similar. But it's more like: TSMC vs. Intel in this case.
@@uku4171 I've heard that Intel's 10nm and TSMC's 7nm are pretty comparable, even though TSMC is saying their features are 30% smaller. That could just be Intel's PR department pushing that retoric though.
I would argue the biggest tech company you've never heard of in the semiconductor world is actually Applied Materials, larger market cap than ASML ($26B vs $18B) and largest maker of semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Litho is super cool and absolutely critical but still only one step out of dozens even hundreds in making a chip.
The physical limits and necessity of using quantum tunneling has to do with the wavelength of an electron. That shows just how insane technology is getting. This was a problem being researched 25 years ago. The speed of a computer used to be tied to the clock speed, but now it's way more complicated.
When I first learned of how these machines generate the EUV light from the Asianometry channel, I could hardly believe THAT was the choice the engineers chose. It’s so bafflingly complicated, yet impressive.
Asianometry channel, great choice. I watch that too. 🙂
@@autohmae Right? I think that EUV video is how I found his channel. All his videos are super interesting. :)
@@BRUXXUS I'm in the computing industry, on the software side, his channel is how I keep up with my general knowledge on the hardware side of things.
I know youtube is pushing Shorts, but I prefer your longer videos so much more. I wish TH-cam didn't push creators like this. Awesome video!
5:35
That was yet another wholesome dad joke, further securing your role as Internet science dad
Off topic of the video, but pertaining to your sponsor. Love the thing. Works great and I haven't had razor burn since I started using it. Took a while to get the form down because it's totally different than a multi blade razor, but once you get figure it out, it's wonderful.
Regarding Henson, I shave with a double edge safety razor and highly recommend it. I will definitely be trying out one of these razors.
When I worked in the old Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector (that was eventually spun out into Freescale), we called those boule cylinders boule-oni. ... you know... because of it's shape... never mind.
Rebuilding the fabs and the workers to run them is going to be tough!
Your “overthinking it cam” segment actually kind of blew my mind.
Glad you clarified that “building” a chip requires designing a chip first, which is done by a multitude of companies.
The majority of chips actually don't go through the EUV process that ASML basically owns. Most chips don't require technology that small. There are still plenty of 8" fabs still making "old" tech for use in cars, medical equipment, etc.
Yeah, but also I don't think a lot of new plants like that are being build. The reason is simple: companies like to make sure they can produce the high-end and then later use those machines to produce the old chips. Thus not having to invest in new machines. As I understand it this is actually part of the reason the high demand for less advanced chips can't be satisfied. Nobody (or not enough companies) is willing to buy older technology machines to build cheap mass-market chips. Because those machines are still expensive and the mass production of cheap chips doesn't pay back enough to allow that investment.
And Zeiss is the only company in the world capable of making the mirrors and lenses for ASML's top-end machines.
Carl Zeiss Optronics GmbH also made JWST's mirrors.
... and have been doing that for decades, even before ASML came on the scene.
Nice video, Asianometry does some seriously deep dives on the subject. Well worth watching.
I would always see ASML at career fairs. I didn't know what they did but loved their banner that read, "Your tech company's favorite tech company". When I learned about what they did last year that banner made sense and I was surprised to learn of their importance in the market.
Ah yes, the Chipping Guild
It's not true that ASML is the only company, as you said. Applied Materials is also a key player, I used to work for them.
@Joe, Texas Instruments is *very much* a behemoth in the semiconductor industry. If you've bought a decent quality consumer electronics good this year, 50% chance of having one or more TI chips in it. They make a huge range of chips like basic industrial processors, wireless SoCs, huge analog market (ADC, op-amps, comparators). Tons of stuff in the power supply space. TI is awesome.
Learned about TSM through pc hobbies. Learned of ASML when I started investing. Monopolies or darn near it, tend to do well in good markets.
I am a semiconductor Equipment Engineer working at Nexperia Newport (yes the one the UK government are trying to shut down! 🤬)
Photolithography is just one step in many many different steps to complete and populate a semiconductor wafer. It typically works in cycles of deposition, photolithography and etch (massive over simplification there!). These go through multiple machines made by multiple manufacturers. It can take several months and hundreds of individual processes to complete a single wafer. The wafer is then diced up into the individual devices before going onto the final stages of packaging etc. They're then sold on to the companies that fit them into the devices that use them, such as toys, toasters to smartphones and computers.
Its he most important industry that people know the least about! :P
The government isn't trying to shut it down. They're trying to force a sale.
@@Yo-ItsYo you’re absolutely right of course. Please excuse my sarcastic frustration there! We as a workforce are extremely unhappy with this situation and very much want to stay with Nexperia. They have been amazing to us and invested millions upon millions into our site! We absolutely do not agree with the government’s reasons for the divestment order. They’re based on half truths, what if’s and not the facts on the ground.
I have to correct you: Koninklijke Philips N.V. (lit. 'Royal Philips'), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters is still in Eindhoven. I'm Dutch and proud about these light-bulb makers :)
I was waiting in line to purchase my monthly bus ticket a few days ago, and there were this dude and this girl in front of me chatting about existential questions and other stuff. The girl then recommended your channel to the dude. It was the first time I found a fellow enjoyer of your content irl. I regret that I didn't introduce myself 🙁
ASML and TSMC are the real spacing guild of our times.
Texas Instruments has a huge facility in Dallas that is locked down. Whatever they make in there is used for defense contracts. They run 24/7 and have a lot of people working there.
I work in the footprint of an old Motorola chap fab plant. Part of the reason they chose the location was that Moto paid to be wired into the grid from two different substations from two different power companies. It made the local site considered to be basically the most resilient in the entire country.
700 millimeters/sec is faster than a fighter jet?
Yeah, what's up with that? For our special needs friends from over the pond - it's 2ft 4in per second. I mean - I'm not even sure it's enough for a fixed-wing flight. It can't be 700 megameters/sec, right? That'd be ridiculous.
*accelerating figher jet
Because everyone knows: velocity is greater than acceleration
@@j--xe3ke Context.
I like the video, but it has a few missconceptions:
1 - They can't t get the silicon for chip manufacturing from beaches or normal sand (just too bad mixture of other elements too hard to purify), they get it from pulverised Quartz rocks. I guess you could say "Quartz sand", but just saying "sand" while showing a normal beach is missleading
2 - Moore's law doesn't say "doubling the number of transistor every year" as said in the video, but roughly every TWO years.
3 - No planned transistor is based on picometer technology, that is just a marketing name because they have exhausted "nanometer" scale in the marketing department (but we are far from that in manufacturing). The reality is that the next generation transistors (aka "2 nanometer" in marketing terms )will still be hundreds of nanometers in physical size, with the smallest distinguishable details made with a precision in the order of tens of nanometers.
4 - The recent chip shortages had nothing to do with the company doing those machines, but primarily due to unexpected excess demand and secondly due to covid restrictions and a fire accident in a TSMC factory. Regarding the machines ASML have fullfilled all the orders, and BTW if you want more chips it is the factories what takes several years to build (4), not the machines.
5 - The Quantum Tunnel effect is not an undesirable effect but the base of the technology. Chip tansistors work by using quantum tunneling to make the gate conductive.
TI. 1979 Austin TX Working on the old99 .What a time for 19yr The town was so laid back cooool
11:20 Texas Instruments is still huge in boring stuff like mosfets and various other power supply related semiconductors. If you design anything power supply related you know that. When I needed a linear regulator with 10v maximum input and a 200mv or less dropout for a design I found TI was literally the only company that made such a thing (TPS767).
I can see why there's only 1 company because, as you said, it's REALLY difficult but any company having a monopoly concerns me let alone a company that makes something as vital as this. But Scotland won't be making them any time soon so we will be relying on others anyway whether we are still in the UK in the future or not lol
ARM is UK, which is nearly in all mobile devices, TVs, etc. They don't manufacture but sell licences to companies like Qualcomm. They obviously have the capability, so it's just not difficulty but business model. Also selling off key companies to the likes of China, I can assure that there are insidious political agendas. Read the signs, many monopolies are no accident.
@@Clickathon ah ok that's interesting, thanks for that info 👍 and yeah, many monopolies are no accident-id go as far saying most are no accident
Edit-and far as selling off things, unfortunately Westminster has a habit of doing that or enabling it, take oil for example and the UK compared to Norway-Westminster privatised the lot and Norway kept most of it in state hands and now they are much better off for it-around £400 billion better off I was reading recently. There's a very problematic bubble around London and it's causing other areas of the UK to suffer.
Again thanks for that info!
only way other company like that emerges is when people from that company start another one. they have the know how in the field, contacts on people. and why would you start your own company? for money and willing to do it differently make yourself a name. ..... but mostly the vision of money. so if they are paid well for the work and the and the "climate in the office" is acceptable....why leave.
There's also not 1 company. ASML is absolutely the largest but Nikon and Canon both make plenty of lithography tools.
Electrical engineer in the chips Industry
Very good explanation joe. People don’t seem to realize how inbred the hardware industry is. Not just where the silicon comes from and how it’s made and formed, but also how often people change companies. If you meet another chip engineer, they likely also worked at a few other big tech companies.
It’s a big industry in terms of money, but very small in terms of people.
Another thing people need to know is that this stuff takes time. If you buy a new chip today, it was probably first designed about 2-3 years ago. The whole tapeout (manufacturing) process takes a long time.
Anyway, great video!
"it's probably not something you think about much"
ordered my phone in early November, expected delivery mid-February.. I am always thinking about this!
9:35 As far as I know, Philips is headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and its shares are traded at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.
They took "sell the pickaxes" literally, and it worked out.
So before the resource war we’ll have a chip war. 😂 Have a great day Joe!
well chips is a resource
a resource we can go to war over...
i know it was mostly a joke but still
Joe, about Philips being headquartered in the USA... Philips & Co was founded in 1891 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, by Frederik Philips and his son, Gerard. Check their wiki and it will also tell you they are headquartered in Amsterdam.
Another thing besides leading edge high performance chips is the shortage of older fabrication nodes, like 28 nanometer and 65 nanometer parts. The individual components of those chips are better suited for applications like automotive control systems because the internals are larger sized and more resistant to heat, vibration and static electricity. These were the parts keeping nearly finished vehicles sitting on storage yards. And a crap ton of other everyday applications that older processes are best for. Most of these types are made with refurbished chip lithography equipment. There's going to have to be a big investment made in building new machines to keep making old chips soon. That's not going to be cheap either.
I wanted to request a video on this but I was too for a patreon membership :( I live in The Netherlands and I had an entire paragraph in geography class that was dedicated to ASML, I did know a lot about them before that tho, maybe one thing you could make another video on is the German company Zeiss, which is the company that makes those mirrors. ASML is the biggest customer of Zeiss I believe which is also very interesting
Zeiss makes tons of optics for cameras and eyeglasses for consumers plus a ton of custom stuff (Nokia, Sony, ...)
@@pozdroszejset4460 You are right, I should have chosen better words. I have changed it now
I would love to know more about the quantum tunneling problems they are having. Fascinating stuff. Thanks for your videos. Love them.
Basically the transistor gate is so small that enough electrons tunnel through it even when the transistor is "off" that a charge can be read on the other side, causing errors. I'd be really interested in learning about how they're combatting this, there's only so much you can do in 5nm of space
@@justincarter7954 Thank you for explaining that..
Philips is also a Dutch company founded in 1891 in Eindhoven :)
Small correction: The node is called "5nm" but that is just the name, the gates itself are still 51nm long. 4n, 6n etc. are also just node names not the size. They lost the ability to name the node after the size 10 years ago.
You’ve got me curious how manufacturers claim to target picoscale density, when the size of a silicon atom is 0.2nm and it takes several atoms to make a transistor. A brief search of the Web didn’t show any official information, but I see the general public’s claims for the “limit” of how small we can get has shrunk over the past decade.
The 'nm' and 'pm' scale they talk about now is not actually measuring the size of anything the way that it used to. It's purely marketing down, and is just about the density of transistors, not their size.
Yes, Texas Instruments is still a thing. But mostly for scientific research equipment, and military hardware.
Texas Instruments make quite a few key silicon chips too, e.g. power supply control chips.
They make a TON of chips. I’ve been getting into custom PCB design and have all sorts of critical smaller stuff. I’m using one of their boost converter chips in my newest design. 🙂
But also for small jellybean ICs like the NE555 and LM358 and stuff like that
@Santosh Parvatikar Mostly chips. The calculator division represents a fraction of one percent of their business.
TI spilt out the military business in the early 2000s if I recall. I was a UK based TIer on the semiconductor side from 1997 to 2006 - a great company to work for.
You're "overthinking it cam" just blew my mind man.
I know this is late to the game, but ASML is just the litho process (making photo masks). I used to work at Hitachi back in the 90's, and they made the plasma etching machines that actually make the chips via the photo masks laid down by the ASML.
Philips is headquartered in Netherlands not USA
For like a year, I didn’t even know about the chip shortage.
Ever since I got my MacBook Pro in 2016, all my chips came from Frito-Lay.