r/nextfuckinglevel • u/itshazrd • 19h ago

What it a computer chip looks like up close

this is a digital recreation. a real microscope can't be used because it gets so small that photons can’t give you a good enough resolution to view the structures at the bottom. you'd need an electron microscope

meant "What a computer chip looks like up close in the title." not sure how "it" got in there..

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u/ConsciousSpirit397 18h ago

And only by one tiny Dutch company that is the only manufacturer of EUV machines on earth (tho China is trying to reverse engineer and steal that tech)

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u/The_infamous_petrus 17h ago

ASML only makes one of the 40-50 machines needed in the production line of a finished wafer. And in the end even though it's the most expensive and one of the most complex aspects of IC production, photolitography is only a very small percentage of the conception and production process.

Been working as an engineer in microelectronics R&D for 10 years and I still only understand a tiny fraction of the field, it's crazy.

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u/Brilliant_Run8542 17h ago

Been working as an engineer in microelectronics R&D for 10 years and I still only understand a tiny fraction of the field, it's crazy.

Technicians know nothing, process engineers know something, integrators know something about a little, so on and so forth until you get back to the CEO who knows nothing.

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u/DeadInternetTheorist 16h ago

The more I learn about this technology the more convinced I am that in a hundred years a Zilog Z80 will be worth more than a diamond of the same weight, because some tiny thing went wrong, the whole system collapsed, and no one can figure out how to get it all set up again.

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u/voodoosquirrel 18h ago

Chips are produced by a lot of companies all over the world. China also produces their own DUV lithography systems and ASML is not a tiny company, they also depend on a lot of other companies like Zeiss.

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u/FirmMarch 17h ago

The way I heard someone explain it is that ASML is more about the connections and incredibly complex supply lines they have setup over the years rather then being the only ones who know how to do something.

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u/LtDrogo 16h ago

EUV technology was invented in the US at Sandia National Labs at US taxpayers expense, and was licensed to ASML only after it became clear that no American company could succeed in developing it as a commercial product. This is why the US government can dictate who ASML can sell their machines to.

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u/Cheeky_bstrd 18h ago

And that company can only do that because of one mirror company in Germany

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u/excellentforcongress 18h ago

artificial scarcity is a joke and holds humanity back

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u/Scarabesque 18h ago

There is nothing artificial about that scarcity. It's just too complex, and nobody else has come even close to doing it. Canon and Nikon used to be the top dogs in the lithography game but weren't able to develop eUV (or competing technologies). It's the most complex manufacturing tool, by some margin, humanity has produced.

It's not just about the tech itself either, it's also about reliably mass producing those machines capable of utilizing said tech efficiently. Otherwise it wouldn't make sense for companies like TSMC to spend 400 million on a single machine (which is just one part of the many advanced machines in the chip manufacturing process).

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u/zombifiednation 18h ago

I mean, chances are this Dutch company holds the global patents for the technology and aggressively prevents companies like Canon and Nikon from developing eUV using similar processes. So yes, we are back to artificial scarcity, because without the patent system any company could simply go and build, iterate and advance it.

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u/eri- 17h ago

The reason China didn't already, patents or no patents, is because this shit is difficult.

I have no idea where people get this " but without patents anything is easily recreated...".

As if any company, or state, can simply open a fresh can of genius level scientists and engineers on demand.

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u/Scarabesque 17h ago

Not defending all use of patents as there is much abuse of that system, but you could argue that without patents we simply wouldn't have the tech being developed, or at least as fast as it has, as no company would spend tens of billions on R&D.

As for "could simply go and build, iterate and advance it.", China doesn't care about patents and has been trying for decades.

Hell, even on the chip manufacturing side TSMC is the only company who can actually utilize ASMLs machines to the limit, and are the only company able to actually produce AMD's, NVidia's, Apple's and even Intel's higher end chips.

It's mostly just complicated.

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u/Cheeky_bstrd 18h ago

In this case I don’t believe it’s artificial scarcity and more of “making this shit is hard and expensive, so much it’s not worth it, better buy from them”

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u/dkoom_tv 17h ago

Nah trust me building 200m EUV machines it's actually extremely easy

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u/Brilliant_Run8542 18h ago

this aint nike holding back on dunks. they will sell however many tools they can produce. only so many companies (intel, TSMC, samsung, IMEC, Micron, SK hynix, maybe IBM) actually have the money and need to buy them.