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You can't teleport into the future
Having a DUV machine at all is a phase transition, like going from liquid to solid. The machine is still about 25 years behind, but it is important and shouldn't be dismissed.
Chip stocks reacted violently, with a big sell-off in semiconductor capital equipment. If the machine ever reaches ASML's orders, it would be in about five years, and the market has gotten worried, forgotten, and gotten worried again several times along the way.
Some reports describe an EUV machine smuggled into China, which would be a feat of espionage for something that huge, though there is only noise about it. Closing the gap is learning by doing. The doing can't be accelerated, and nobody teleports into the future: the learning cycles have to be lived through.
Why is EUV so much harder than DUV?
EUV light has a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, far shorter than the 193 nanometers of DUV. Air absorbs it, so the whole machine runs in a vacuum, and lenses cannot focus it, so mirrors do the work. The light is made by firing a laser at tiny droplets of molten tin, about 50,000 times a second. Each mirror in the optical path reflects only about 70 percent of the light that reaches it.
Why is chipmaking knowledge so hard to copy?
Much of it is tacit knowledge, learned by running the process rather than reading about it. Intel adopted a policy called Copy Exactly in the 1980s, in which a new factory replicates every detail of a proven one, because tiny changes can alter how many chips work. Yields improve by finding and fixing thousands of small problems over many production runs. A rival with the same blueprint still has to go through those runs.
How did ASML become the only EUV supplier?
The Dutch company spent about two decades developing EUV before it was ready for production. In 2012, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC invested in ASML to help fund the work. The mirrors come from the German firm Zeiss, and the light source from a San Diego company that ASML acquired in 2013. No other company has built a working EUV machine for commercial chip production.
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