Europe finally has a solution to Silicon Valley
TEN TIMES a second an object formed like a thick pizza field and holding a silicon wafer takes off 3 times quicker than a manned rocket. For just a few milliseconds it strikes at a relentless velocity earlier than being halted abruptly with astonishing precision—inside a single atom of its goal. This isn’t a high-energy physics experiment. It’s the newest lithography machine dreamed up by ASML, a producer of chipmaking tools, to venture nanoscopic chip patterns onto silicon wafers. On January fifth Intel, an American semiconductor big, turned the primary proud proprietor of this technical marvel’s preliminary elements for meeting at its factory in Oregon.
Just like the outwardly unassuming machine, its Dutch maker is stuffed with surprises. The corporate’s market worth has quadrupled up to now 5 years, to €260bn ($285bn), making it Europe’s most dear know-how agency (see chart 1). Between 2012 and 2022 its revenues and web revenue each rose roughly four-fold, to €21bn and €6bn, respectively. On the finish of 2023 ASML’s working margin exceeded 34%, staggering for a {hardware} enterprise and greater than that of Apple, the world’s greatest maker of client electronics (see chart 2).
Such stellar efficiency, which is more likely to shine much more brightly when ASML reviews quarterly outcomes on January twenty fourth, is now routine. The agency holds a monopoly on a key hyperlink on this planet’s most crucial provide chain: with out its equipment it’s subsequent to unimaginable to make cutting-edge laptop processors, similar to those who go into smartphones and knowledge centres the place synthetic intelligence (AI) is skilled. With world semiconductor gross sales forecast to double to $1.3trn by 2032, each massive nation and each massive chipmaker needs ASML’s gear. The corporate has develop into so vital within the Sino-American tech-tussle that, because it emerged at first of the yr, President Joe Biden’s administration pressed ASML to cancel deliberate deliveries of even its older machines to China.
But ASML’s spectacular success can also be underpinned by two different, much less apparent components. The corporate has created a community of suppliers and know-how companions which may be the closest factor Europe has to Silicon Valley. And its enterprise mannequin ingeniously combines {hardware} with software program and knowledge. These unsung parts of ASML’s success problem the notion that the outdated continent is incapable of growing a profitable digital platform.
ASML’s complicated machines carry out a easy process. They venture the blueprints of laptop chips onto photosensitive silicon wafers. In 1986, when its first mannequin was delivered, particular person transistors measured micrometres and the corporate’s equipment was nearly like a glorified photocopier, explains Marc Hijink, a Dutch journalist and creator of “Focus—How ASML Conquered the Chip World”, a brand new ebook. As we speak, with transistors shrunk by an element of a thousand, ASML lithography gear is probably probably the most refined gear ever bought commercially.
ASML and its companions pulled off this unbelievable shrinking trick with engineering that has a science-fiction ring to it. The method begins with highly effective lasers incinerating droplets of molten tin, every no thicker than a fifth of a human hair and travelling at greater than 250km per hour. This produces extraordinarily short-wavelength gentle (excessive ultraviolet, or EUV, within the jargon) which is then mirrored by a set of mirrors so clean that the most important imperfection is not any greater than the space grass can develop in a millisecond. To make all this price a chipmaker’s whereas—the most recent mannequin prices greater than $300m—and expose sufficient chips, the thing that holds the wafer, known as a “desk”, has to speed up quicker than a rocket and are available to a cease at precisely the proper spot.
To get an thought of what it takes to construct such a tool, pay a go to to a nondescript manufacturing unit in Neukölln, a neighbourhood of Berlin. That is the place ASML makes, amongst different issues, “mirror blocks”, the primary a part of a wafer desk. These are sturdy items of a particular ceramic materials, a sq. 8cm thick and measuring about 50cm on both sides. Some get polished, measured, repolished, remeasured and so forth, for practically a yr—till they’re precisely the proper form, together with allowances for the truth that they’ll sag just a few nanometers as soon as put in.
The manufacturing unit is emblematic of the corporate’s uncommon community of suppliers. Though its proprietor, Berliner Glas, was acquired by ASML in 2020, it lives midway between being an impartial firm and a unit of the Dutch father or mother. One thing comparable is true of the 800 or so largely European companies that assist put collectively ASML’s machines. ASML solely owns stakes in just a few of them. But their interdependence makes them act like a single organisation.
ASML outsources over 90% of what it prices to construct considered one of its engineering marvels and straight employs fewer than half the estimated 100,000 folks the feat requires. That is partly owing to historical past. When the corporate was spun out of Philips, a Dutch electronics big, in 1984, ASML appeared stillborn. Its thought to construct a “silicon stepper”, the unique title of the chip-copying machine, was promising. However it had not a lot else going for it, particularly no manufacturing strains. It as a substitute relied on specialist suppliers, a lot of them additionally former Philips models, similar to VDL, a contract producer.
Outsourcing can also be a perform of know-how. The completely different components of a lithography machine are so cutting-edge that doing all of it may simply overwhelm any single firm. “It’s important to resolve the place you add probably the most worth and let others do the remaining,” explains a former ASML insider. Semiconductor economics likewise favours not doing the whole lot your self. The chip trade is vulnerable to booms and busts, as a result of demand strikes up and down way more rapidly than producers can set up capability. Costs rise and fall as shortages flip to gluts. Makers of chipmaking gear are uncovered to the identical cycles. That makes maintaining all of the belongings in-house dangerous; higher to switch a few of that danger on to suppliers, who can in flip restrict it by catering to prospects who work to completely different enterprise cycles.
The required hyper-specialisation prevents the risk-reducing double sourcing that’s prevalent in lots of different industries. Within the case of ASML, technical calls for are so excessive and manufacturing volumes so low (it shipped 317 machines in 2022) that it might be uneconomical to handle a number of suppliers for a single half even when they could possibly be discovered. For such essential elements as lasers and mirrors, that are made by Trumpf and Zeiss, two German companies, respectively, it’s unimaginable. Wayne Allan, who’s in command of sourcing on ASML’s board, talks of “co-dependency”.
The upshot is that ASML largely limits itself to being the system’s architect. It decides who does what, defines the interfaces between the important thing components of its machines, which it calls “modules”, and carries out analysis and growth. This set-up makes it simpler to check the items and transport the machines (delivery the most recent mannequin to Intel concerned 250 crates and 13 containers). It additionally offers suppliers extra freedom, together with to experiment with novel applied sciences.
All of it works as a result of ASML has cultivated a tradition of belief and transparency whereas preserving parts of competitors. Suppliers should not squeezed to the final penny. Fairly the alternative: “We’d like them to remain wholesome,” says Mr Allan. Data flows freely all through the community, notably between ASML, Trumpf and Zeiss. Engineering groups from completely different companies work collectively, patents are shared, as is a few monetary knowledge and, typically, income. “At conferences you possibly can’t inform who’s from which agency,” reviews a former Zeiss government.
On the identical time, many suppliers compete with one another not directly, for example offering comparable components for various generations of ASML’s machines. If a provider runs into hassle, ASML dispatches a speedy intervention power, typically even when such assist isn’t welcome. As a final resort, ASML should purchase a provider, as was the case with Berliner Glas.
It’s this loosely coupled construction that allowed ASML to outcompete its extra vertically built-in rivals, reckons Willy Shih of Harvard Enterprise Faculty. Nikon and Canon, two Japanese companies which as soon as led the marketplace for lithography machines, by no means managed to commercialise the extra complicated EUV equipment. (Canon is attempting to stage a return with “nanoimprint” lithography, which bodily stamps chip designs onto wafers.)
ASML is now entrenching this dominance by complementing its {hardware} with software program and knowledge. When actual rockets take off, their trajectory is wobbly and must be smoothed out by a steering laptop, which collects knowledge to foretell and adapt their course. A wafer desk in a lithography machine is equally more likely to miss the mark at first. The identical is true of the remainder of the machine. It is just with the assistance of a number of knowledge and machine-learning, a kind of AI, that they are often fine-tuned—and made extra correct. That is quickly turning ASML into an AI platform.
As soon as Intel has obtained all of the modules for its new machine, it would take about two weeks to place the factor collectively. Adapting it to its new location will take a number of months. Bits might have moved in transport, gravity could also be barely completely different in Oregon from in Veldhoven and different machines close by might create interference. Assessments will gather reams of information and set off changes. “We have now hundreds of knobs we will flip to place it into an ideal state,” says Jos Benschop, who’s in command of know-how at ASML.
ASML additionally makes use of the information from one machine to show the knobs of others. Of the roughly 5,500 units it has bought since its founding 39 years in the past, 95% are nonetheless in operation and plenty of ship knowledge dwelling to headquarters. That may make its merchandise even higher, resulting in extra chipmaking, which generates much more knowledge—and so forth, in a “flywheel” extra sometimes related to digital companies similar to web search. Even when Canon, Nikon or a Chinese language competitor lastly managed to construct EUV machines as highly effective as ASML’s, it might not have the ability to meet up with the Dutch agency, argues Pierre Ferragu of New Avenue Analysis, a analysis agency. “It’s mathematically unimaginable, so long as ASML retains amassing knowledge from all of the put in base.”
If rivals can not topple ASML, can something? Physics is one potential hurdle. Even with the most effective AI, you can’t shrink transistors for ever (definitely not in a commercially viable manner). If technical necessities develop into too otherworldly the provider community might unravel. Economics is one other. Chipmakers might recoil at ASML’s knowledge starvation, which extends to different linked units of their factories. Some have apparently began to push again in opposition to its digital enlargement, insiders say.
Then there’s geopolitics. ASML’s share worth dipped after information broke in regards to the cancelled deliveries to China. The fear is much less over decrease gross sales; ASML can not construct its machines quick sufficient anyway. Of higher concern is the chance that strict export controls may in time push China to construct its personal chipmaking-gear trade. That would in the future threaten ASML’s place on the centre of the trade. In the meanwhile, although, the corporate’s community and its community results stay indomitable. Who mentioned Europe couldn’t do tech? ■
Correction (ninth January): An earlier model of this text said that Jos Benschop is a board member at ASML. He’s truly a vice-president on the firm. Apologies.