Comment on Bootstrapping Your Own CPU
tengkuizdihar@programming.dev 6 days agoNow about that fab line, is that still protected under a secrecy license? What’s stopping the Chinese from making their own fab line besides the ASML monopoly?
Comment on Bootstrapping Your Own CPU
tengkuizdihar@programming.dev 6 days agoNow about that fab line, is that still protected under a secrecy license? What’s stopping the Chinese from making their own fab line besides the ASML monopoly?
IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 5 days ago
Well, first of all China does make lithography equipment (for instance, Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment, who are currently at 28 nm). There are a couple of others iirc, and they typically got started by licensing lithography technology from Japanese companies and then building on it.
The issue is mostly one of economics – fabs want higher-resolution lithography as soon as possible, and they only buy it once, which means that the first company to develop new litho technologies takes the lions share of the revenue. If you’re second to the technology, or are more than half a dozen nodes behind like SMEE is, theres not a lot of demand because there are fabs full of litho machines from when that node was new, and theres not as much demand for them anymore.
The issue with a new company making leading edge nodes is the incredible R&D and development cost involved. Nikon, Canon, and ASML shared the market when they all started developing EUV tech, and it took ASML 15+ years to develop it! Canon and Nikon teamed up, spent tens of billions of dollars on R&D, and dropped out once they realized they couldn’t beat ASML to market because there wouldn’t be enough market left for them to make their money back.
If you want to learn more about the history of the semiconductor industry, I recommend the Asianometry YouTube channel!
tengkuizdihar@programming.dev 5 days ago
thank you for this explanation, it gave me the right perspective. I will check that channel out!