ASML

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Don Clark, A Dutch Machine Is Crucial for Chips. China Can't Buy It.  In the midst of a tech cold war, a complex $150 million tool illustrates the interconnected global supply chain. New York Times, July 5, 2021, at page B1 (B is Business section).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/ ... rchResultPosition=1
https://cn.nytimes.com/technolog ... old-war-chips/dual/

excerpt in the window of print: $1T  The estimated amount it would take to create a self-sufficient chip su[[ly chain.

Note:
(a) Meet the Media – Don Clark, The New York Times. Landis Communications Inc, Apr 20, 2020
https://www.landispr.com/pr/meet ... the-new-york-times/
("Don Clark, a longtime, San Francisco-based reporter and editor for The Wall Street Journal, now writes technology stories as a freelancer with The New York Times.")

(b) "The machine is made by ASML Holding, based in Veldhoven. * * *  * * * ASML, a once obscure company whose market value now exceeds $285 billion."
(i)
(A) "table: Population (January 2019)         45,337" en.wikipedia.org for Veldhoven
is a town on southwestern border of Eindhoven
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eindhoven
("is the fifth-largest city * * * of the Netherlands"/ table: Population (Jan 2019) 231,642/ section 1 Etymology)
(B) (Modern) Dutch-English dictionary:
* einde or eind (both nouns neuter): "end"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eind
* hof (noun neuter or masculine; plural  hoven)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hof
* biet or beet (noun feminine): "beet"  (The beet in Modern English descends from Old English bete, from Latin noun feminine bēta beet.)  
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biet
(C) Helene Preminger, Beethoven's Van. Los Angeles Times, Sept 4, 1988 (Letter to editor).
https://www.latimes.com/archives ... -bk-2362-story.html

full text:

"Your July 17 edition of 'Nonfiction in Brief' contained a review of Maynard Solomon's 'Beethoven Essays' by Sonja Bolle. In it, the following statement was made: ". . . and his pretentions to nobility (the ‘Von’ was not his by birthright).”

"Beethoven's name was not Von Beethoven but Ludwig van Beethoven and certainly his birthright! The family was of Dutch origin and retained their Dutch name after settling in Germany. The Dutch 'van' has nothing to do with nobility--it merely means 'from.' Beethoven means 'beet farm.' The name tells us that this great composer was the descendant of Dutch beet farmers.

"Beethoven was a proud, independent man, a democrat, who never considered the nobility or royalty superior species. He demonstrated this many times, as when tearing up the dedication of his third symphony after Napoleon crowned himself emperor. (Beethoven admired Napoleon only when he thought him to be a revolutionary.)

(ii) Market cap(italization) for Intel and TSMC at the close of July 13, 2021 was $230 and $556 billion, respectively.


(c) "Created in 1984 by the electronics giant Philips and another toolmaker, Advanced Semiconductor Materials International, ASML became an independent company and by far the biggest supplier of chip-manufacturing equipment that involves a process called lithography."
(i) ASML Holding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding
(section 2 Company: "The company (originally named ASM Lithography, current name ASML, which is an official name and not an abbreviation [same as BP, which used to be British Petroleum]) was founded in 1984 as a joint venture between the Dutch companies Advanced Semiconductor Materials International (ASMI [still operating in making semiconductor equipment]) and Philips. Nowadays it is a public company with only a minority of the shares owned by Philips")
(ii) History. ASML, undated
https://www.asml.com/en/company/about-asml/history   
("In 1995, ASML became a fully independent public company, listed on the Amsterdam and New York stock exchanges")
(iii) lithography (as in printing).

Printing can be grouped technically into relief printing and intaglio printing.
(A) In the former (which generates a mirror image: left is right) is woodcut, where relief is made by removing the surface that one does not want to be printed (and that will appear white in white paper).  
"Woodcut originated in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later on paper."  en.wikipedia.org for Woodcut.
(B) intaglio (n; etymology; Did You Know?)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intaglio
uses a surface harder than one for woodcut, and produces a line sharper, thinner than woodcut. Engraving and etching (where acid is deployed to cut metal) are examples of intaglio printing. In intaglio printing, the removed surface retains ink and will be printed (as black in white paper). See the illustration in
intaglio (printmaking)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intaglio_(printmaking)
. and brings about printing that is exactly the same as the template (not mirror image). See the last photo in
Engraving. Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met), undated
https://www.metmuseum.org/about- ... intmaking/engraving

A type of intaglio printing, lithography was invented in 1796 by Bavarian author and actor Alois Senefelder, who used Bavarian limestone (hence the name; Ancient Greek noun masculine lithos stone) which is heavy and replaced with a metal plate. Lithography is based on the principle that water and grease/ fat won't mix but rather aggregate with their kind: word or images is written with fatty material, oily ink will later adhere to it, and paper is then applied. Lithography is simpler than engineering or etching, s no cutting is involved.
(C) Of course, in semiconductor we are not talking about lithography, but photolithography. See next.


(d) "Using lithography, manufacturers repeatedly project patterns of chip circuitry onto silicon wafers. * * * In 1997, ASML began studying a shift to using extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, light. Such light has ultrasmall wavelengths that can create much tinier circuitry than is possible with conventional lithography. * * * ASML now assembles the advanced machines using mirrors from Germany and [Cymer] hardware developed in San Diego that generates light by blasting tin droplets with a laser. Key chemicals and components come from Japan. * * * That development was made trickier by the quirks of extreme ultraviolet light. Lithography machines usually focus light through lenses to project circuit patterns on wafers. But the small EUV wavelengths are absorbed by glass, so lenses won't work. Mirrors, another common tool to direct light, have the same problem. That meant the new lithography required mirrors with complex coatings that combined to better reflect the small wavelengths.  So ASML turned to Zeiss Group, a 175-year-old German optics company and longtime partner. Its contributions included a two-ton projection system to handle extreme ultraviolet light, with six specially shaped mirrors that are ground, polished and coated over several months in an elaborate robotic process that uses ion beams to remove defects. * * * Generating sufficient light to project images quickly also [became an issue and] caused delays [in developing semiconductor equiopment] * * * But Cymer, a San Diego company that ASML bought in 2013, eventually improved a system that directs pulses from a high-powered laser to hit droplets of tin 50,000 times a second — once to flatten them and a second time to vaporize them — to create intense light.  The new system also required redesigned components called photomasks, which act like stencils in projecting circuit designs, as well as new chemicals deposited on wafers that generate those images when exposed to light. Japanese companies now supply most of those products.  Since ASML introduced its commercial EUV model in 2017, customers have bought about 100 of them."
(i) "Visible light is usually defined as having wavelengths in the range of 400–700 nanometres (nm), between the infrared (with longer wavelengths) and the ultraviolet (with shorter wavelengths [10-400 nm]). * * * Various sources define visible light as narrowly as 420–680 nm to as broadly as 380–800 nm. Under ideal laboratory conditions, people can see infrared up to at least 1,050 nm; children and young adults may perceive ultraviolet wavelengths down to about 310–313 nm."  en.wikipedia.org for (visible) "light" (citations omitted).
(ii) In ASML website, "Products" (menu is found in the lower left corner of the home page) are "EUV lithography systems" and "DUV [deep UV] lithography systems." The "latest generation" in the former is TWINSCAN NXE:3400C to "support EUV volume production at the 7 and 5 nm nodes * * * enable a robust solution for cost-effective volume production starting in the second half of 2019" -- following NXE:3400B and NXE:3400 (first generation of EUV; no NXE:3400A ever).

It (web page) also describes EUV "of 13.5 nanometers (nearly x-ray level)."  "X-rays have a wavelength ranging from 10 picometers to 10 nanometers."  enwikipedia.org for x-ray.
(iii) Optical lithography or photolithography is portrayed, in a nutshell:
(A) Sebastian Engelmann, Hiroyuki (Hiro) Miyazoe and Leslie Thompson, Lithography Materials. IBM Research, undated/
https://researcher.watson.ibm.co ... subpage.php?id=3661
(B) Fig 3.8 of
Kumar DS, Kumar BJ and Mahesh HM, Chapter 3 Quantum Nanostructures (QDs): An Overview. In Bhagyaraj, Oluwafemi OS, Kalarikkal K and Thomas S (eds), Synthesis of Inorganic Nanomaterials; Advances and key technologies. Woodhead Publishing, 2018
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/lithography
(iv) Samanth Subramanian, The company that modern capitalism couldn’t survive long without. Quartz.com, Apr 9, 2021
https://qz.com/1992988/asml-is-a ... microchip-shortage/

Quote: "ASML assembles photolithography machines, which etch circuit patterns onto chip wafers using low-wavelength light. Other companies make such machines too, but ASML controls more than 60% of the market; in 2019, its revenue was 11.8 billion euros ($13.2 billion). It is also the only manufacturer of the latest, most precise generation of chip-making machines, which uses extreme ultraviolet light (EUV), with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers—a ten-thousandth the width of a human hair. * * * The machines needed to get lasers to hit every one of 50,000 drops of molten tin released each second, so that the resultant plasma would generate 13.5 nanometre light [which is extreme uv or EUV]. * * * the first production-ready machines in 2016. Each EUV weighs 180 tons * * * Samsung and TSMC used EUV machines, said Velu Sinha, a partner in Bain & Company's technology practice, 'whereas Intel announced recently that one of its challenges was that it hadn't relied on EUV much at all.' ASML sells hundreds of photolithography machines every year, and most of them aren't EUVs * * * 'The concern was, if you allow China to go and make chips at scale using an EUV, those chips would be impossible to scrutinize with all their billions of transistors on them,' Sinha said. * * * ASML's EUV was placed on the Wassenaar list, a multilateral regime that controls the export of several critical technologies to non-member states such as China.  It doesn't take any great insight into the human psyche to discover what [Peter] Wennink, ASML's CEO, thinks of not being able to sell to the world’s biggest market. He knows that behind the ban on selling EUVs to China is not just a worry about national security but also an act of economic one-upmanship—a desire to keep China dependent on non-Chinese vendors. Most military applications don’t even need cutting-edge chips from EUVs, he argued. They can work just fine with older chips")

QD in the title stands for quantum dot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot

(v) Clicking the "Technology" tag in the menu leads to
https://www.asml.com/en/technolo ... es/light-and-lasers
, whose section 2 is "Principles of lithography." Please read it, in particular the panel of "Light and lasers" at the bottom.
(A) mercury-vapor lamp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-vapor_lamp
("Clear mercury lamps produce white light with a bluish-green tint due to mercury's combination of spectral lines. This is not flattering to human skin color, so such lamps are typically not used in retail stores. [section 1 Origins: In] 1896 Herbert John Dowsing and HS Keating of England patented a mercury vapor lamp, considered by some to be the first true mercury vapor lamp"/ section 7 Ultraviolet hazard; section 8 Uses, section 8.1 Area and street lighting)

In US, Energy Policy Act of 2005 phased out mercury-vapor lamp due to concern over mercury. S well as neon light or sign (see bottom: UCAR) ercury vapor lamp is part of gas-discharge lamp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-discharge_lamp  
("that generate light by sending an electric discharge through an ionized gas, a plasma")
(B) "Lasers and DUV[:] In the mid-1980s, the industry demand for smaller features led to another shift to shorter wavelengths. And this time, a whole new way of making light was needed: lasers. In particular, deep ultraviolet (DUV) excimer lasers. These lasers use mixtures of gases that don't normally combine. However, when enough energy is applied, atoms of the two gases join together to form excited temporary molecules (excimers). * * *"
• noble gas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_gas  
(historically also the inert gases; section 1 History: name)
• excimer laser
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excimer_laser
(section 1 Terminology and history: "The term excimer is short for 'excited dimer' * * * 176 nm  reported in 1971 by [Russians], using liquid xenon dimer (Xe2) excited by an electron beam")
• Plasma. Center for Science Education, UCAR, undated
https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/sun-space-weather/plasma
("A plasma is generally a mix of these positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons")

University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un ... tmospheric_Research
(UCAR)