Intel Starts Shipping High-NA EUV Silicon
morethanmoore.substack.com145 points by zdw 4 days ago
145 points by zdw 4 days ago
I believe Intel has a winner with the upcoming Crescent Island GPUs with up to 480GB of LPDDR5 memory. A lot of SMEs will need local AI with large open weights models (i.e. >1.5TB of VRAM), but they don't need a watercooled 8x Nvidia GB300 box. Besides, it's difficult to deploy and very expensive.
Crescent island is air cooled and likely fast enough for a group of users running something like GLM 5.2 or Kimi K3.
I thought Nvidia after they invested in Intel killed Intel’s GPU efforts as it could be a threat to Nvidia’s GPUs
My general take is all of The GPU design efforts are going toward Enterprise / datacenter graphics cards. They are just skipping a generation or two of consumer.
To Nvidia the biggest threat is a capex cut from big tech not another company in the same domain, maybe some Chinese companies but people aren't going to be moving off of Nvidia for large deployments in the short term even if some TPU/Tranium etc is used it's not close to Nvidia.
I have no explanation other than people, researchers are comfortable with it and don't want to switch.
Amazing looking machine! $380 million a pop. Must surely be one of the most sophisticated machines humanity has ever built? A great achievement of European science and technology (ducks).
> A great achievement of European science and technology
It's an amazing piece of technology but this is... wildly wrong. ASML is a multi-national company that licenses IP largely from USA and Japan, but also Taiwan and Germany. The actual EUV light source is developed and produced in California by Cymer, which ASML acquired in 2013. But ASML was only permitted to acquire the company under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement with the US government. Additionally, a huge portion of the photolithography research is directly developed (and owned) by US companies and research organizations such as IBM, Albany NanoTech, and SEMATECH.
There is a reason why ASML's next-generation research photolithography machine is currently being installed and developed in upstate New York, and not somewhere in the Netherlands. The same reason that Cymer is still in San Diego instead of being relocated to Europe. Because it's American technology.
But Europe certainly plays a huge role in it.
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-n...
https://research.ibm.com/blog/euv-center-albany-nstc
https://www.eetimes.com/asml-sematech-team-on-manufacturing-...
https://www.eetimes.com/asml-to-build-400-million-us-researc...
> There is a reason why ASML's next-generation research photolithography machine is currently being installed and developed in upstate New York, and not somewhere in the Netherlands. The same reason that Cymer is still in San Diego instead of being relocated to Europe.
Why is the Netherlands government even allowing this?
Because ASML acquired the US company that created this tech and the agreement for allowing Netherlands to do so was that the tech and know how remain in the US.
The supply chain both in parts for their machines, but also in terms of research and technology for new machines is very deep and very international. If the US states that a technology can only be used by ASML if they keep R&D in the US, then there is no easy alternative for ASML.
That is true not only for ASML, but for the semiconductor industry in general. The number of smaller, specialized companies for certain tools, chemicals and software is staggering. And they sit all over the US, Europe, Japan, Taiwan and Korea.
The entire multinational effort is in US-Europe-E.Asian countries which are a coordinated allied bloc. The Netherlands allows it because they are entirely aligned.
Strong mutual defense agreements cover four out of the five crucial countries here (NATO, Anpo, MDT US/ROK) and the last (Taiwan) has arms sales assurances.
It’s not like these are strongly opposed nations or anything. Part of the same fleet in some sense.
The EUV lithography process and other pieces that comprise what ASML sells was developed with US government funding, and it remains encumbered by that. The US government thus has veto power over the tech, and thus over ASML.
> The actual EUV light source is developed and produced in California by Cymer, which ASML acquired in 2013.
Cymer was one of multiple vendors (Gigaphoton, XTREME) providing this sort of light source, and ASML acquired it because it couldn't achieve what they wanted (they needed 100+W and Cymer could only achieve 15W). ASML needed to control and fund the company, and add engineering talent, to achieve what they actually needed.
Oh and ASML bought Cymer because Gigaphoton (another company at basically the same stage of development as Cymer), being a Japanese company, objected to foreign control. Though if ASML knew the protectionist, insular direction the US was going to go they probably would rethink their past decisions.
So this retconning that Cymer is really the secret magic of ASML and the Netherlands is just stealing US ingenuity is hilarious stuff.
And for that matter, it is amazing how so often we hear about "American" tech that is actually overwhelmingly combining acquisitions and manpower from abroad. Like is an iPhone an "American" creation? LOL, no.
isnt DUV and EUV technologies discovered and developed by US national labs (LLNL, LBNL, Sandia) in cooperation with EUV Consortsium funded by US Chipmakers (Intel, AMD, Motorola) and licenced to Cymer?
EUV was "invented" (demonstrated) in Japan first, though those US labs did a lot of work on the overall lithography system and reflective optics to put it into practice. The US DOE along with the manufacturers made a consortium (EUV LLC consortium) to commercialize/scale that Japanese technology because they could obviously see the promise, and Cymer is a member, as was ASML already via SVG.
Simultaneously Japan created its own initiative (EUVA), and Gigaphoton didn't rely upon the US initiative at all. And again in an alternate universe -- one where Japan isn't protectionist and Cymer wasn't out of financial runway and desperate -- we'd be talking about how ASML is really Japanese tech, etc.
> the secret magic of ASML and the Netherlands is just stealing US ingenuity is hilarious stuff.
I never said anything about ASML stealing technology or ingenuity. The point is that EUV photolithography is an international effort. The machines don't exist at all without about 6 different countries contributing technology and expertise.
ASML has certainly proven itself to be a very capable integrator of many international technologies and processes.
Most of those technologies being European, including the most difficult to make components in the system.
Why isn't there an American company doing this? Why isn't an American company making the lasers, mirrors, metrology, vacuum handling tech, etc?
The most absurdly biased and inaccurate take on ASML I've ever seen, congrats.
If the machines are so easy to build and integrate, why isn't it happening in America?
EUV was developed in a joint venture with the Department of Energy and ASML, Intel, etc called EUV Corp. It’s why the US can export control it.
LOL, no Mention of IMEC(Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre) in the EUV development process and the only reason that the US can restrict the ASML EUV equipment is the EUV Light source and mirror optics for that is partially US produced and the IP there falls under US IP/Export restrictions!
From ASML:
"ASML’s extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light source was developed and is manufactured at its facility in San Diego, California. Acquired from the US firm Cymer in 2013, the R&D team here developed the laser-produced plasma (LPP) system that fires lasers at tin droplets 50,000 times per second to generate EUV light."
> Amazing looking machine!
As with most of this type of technology, most of the stuff you see is basically a giant refrigerator and giant vacuum cleaner. The actual meat is much smaller and hidden from view.
Depends on definition of machine. Do ISS, LHC or ITER count?
ASMLs machines can easily be "one of the most sophisticated" without stepping on LHC or ITERs toes. I'm not sure ISS qualifies anymore. I would have went with JWST.
no.
neither of the observations gp made is dependent upon the definition of machine, nor is it dependent on the inclusion of the examples you brought up in that definition.
That's what makes this hard to interpret. The whole strategy of intel is that they have their own version of this machine, part of their "18A" design. The only reason they need the ASML machine is because of the "optics" (between quotes because at the frequencies they work at no optics work - only (bad) mirrors do. However you need make the mirrors accurate enough - we're talking far more accurate than the chips, as in sub-nanometer max deviation, they can function as optics with high losses, but low enough that exposure works). No American company can achieve even 10 times lower accuracy at the moment.
So is this giving up on their own version? That would mean their stock price is absolutely not justified at $110, and it should be more like $60-70 if not lower. Or is this "we have technical reasons to use this. We're still going to do 18A and it's still going to beat 2nm", which would mean their stock price is easily justified at $200 and it's high time to buy.
As I understand it, the machine also needs lots of 'normal parts' and can be designed differently to fit the factory and the automation. Like if you need a pipe, instead of buying it from ASML, you can buy it from a local hardware vendor. And parts of the ASML also break, and those parts would be directly shipped from the vendor that makes the part. ASML manages the integration between these parts and each part can have multiple vendors that makes them according to the specs.
Only the optics is an ... interesting way of phrasing it.
There was a great Economist article a while ago that talks about this. ASMLs moat isn't just the know-how to build the machines themselves. It's a network of suppliers all across Europe, specialized businesses doing one little part better than anyone else in the world.
This is the type of thing that Europe is still leading in, and it'll be incredibly hard to reproduce elsewhere.
You don't just need to figure out how to build an High-NA EUV machine. You need to figure out how to build or procure all of the parts that go into it. Many of these suppliers have exclusive contracts with ASML.
Here's the article, de-paywalled: https://archive.ph/jP1HX
Yeah. ASML doesn't make the mirrors, but they have exclusive sales rights, exactly as you say. And yes, positioning them, for example, both in the fixed sense (mounting the mirrors in the machine) and in the dynamic sense (rapidly positioning wafers to nanometer-or-better accuracy below the beam, I forgot how quick exactly but it's 10s to 100s of times per second to maintain production rates) is very much not easy either. But it's "been done" (by teams of phds). Producing the mirrors has not been duplicated.
Of course, producing the EUV beam in the first place has also not been duplicated and it's Californian technology.
Intel 18A has a different strategy all together. I mean, it's not like they're saying much about it, but from the little we know, it's very different.
No the beam source we know how to create; it's just that the way to do so requires a factory sized machine that better be feeding 10~30 steppers or a pair for uptime/maintenance windows and then probably more like 50 steppers.
Free electron lasers are not hard at "mere EUV", and the accelerators to feed aren't either, it's just that an efficient setup requires recycling the beam which means bending it back which means a large (factory hall sized) accelerator at the beam energies needed for good EUV light.
Basically most of the technology was US govt funded at some point. Now the Dutch can just leech off of that. I guess that’s what they’re good at considering their long history with VOC and “mercantilism”.
> A great achievement of European science and technology (ducks).
It's a fantastic machine but the bulk of the achievement is clearly a joint European-American effort.
Then Apple M series is also a joint European-American effort, no? Since ARM is European?
Weirdly enough it never seems to work that way in discourse.
Should add China to the list of pretty much all of them as well. It’s a silly take.
In that case the internet is mostly due to the Brits (invention of packet switching at the NPL by Donald Davies). Cheers!
Not even that, the company happens to be Dutch but it's employees are from everywhere. A company doesn't make anything, the employees do, especially in a sector like this.
The companies job is to hire well and create strong teams that work together.
> ASML moved to camera-style anamorphic optics that magnify the mask by different amounts along the two axes
Does this mean they do high-resolution designs in the center of the lens and low-resolution designs in the periphery?
I wish that, but for high performance RISC-V micro-achitectures.
Im rooting for Intel. I hate the current paradigm where all the best chips are made in one factory in Asia.
Tsmc are opening 10 factories in USA at cost of $265bn
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-tsmc-us-investment...
Intel staying strong is still vital for competitiveness though
Until they are built, it's all talk.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/21/foxconn-mostly-abandons-10-b...
They are built, at least one in Phoenix:
> As of 2025, the first fab has been completed and is producing four-nanometer (nm) chips.
One is built, OP said 10.
Gotta start somewhere. Plus foxconn only abandoned 1 DC build out during Covid, a bit different from TSMC investing billions to build multiple, of which they already built 1.
TSMC also AFAIK is forbidden from setting up bleeding-edge fabs outside of Taiwan?
Four more 2nm (or below) fabs in Arizona. That's bleeding-edge or very close to it.
IMO it's competition that makes better products in the end. If either party becomes a full monopolist the progress will stall (as already happened with Intel I guess)
> as already happened with Intel I guess
In which sense? Intel is neither a full monopolist (AMD, ARM) nor has progress stalled (we're still getting a regular cycle of new generation CPUs which improve on the previous).
Intel didn't do much to improve their CPUs while AMD was out of the competition with the Bulldozer disaster.
It was a pretty bad time - ARM wasn't really encroaching on any of their markets in the way they are now & AMD was struggling. Intel basically just left the engineering to rot & the business people to try and gouge consumers with things like the Intel Upgrade Service, low power CPUs that were essentially just normal cores but less rather than optimized, inflated prices etc.
It also allowed AMD to completely blindside them with Zen - so we're in a situation where AMD now dominates consumer desktop and arguably a lot of enterprise/DC instead of it balancing towards a more competitive centre.
Intel had a monopoly on bleeding edge cpu for a long time until they got stuck on 14nm for years, allowing TSMC to catch up and providing AMD the means to compete.
In a the best of timelines, intel, tsmc and samsung (and glofo maybe?) Would all have competitive fab nodes.
yeah - I wouldn't bet against Intel.
they might have floundered in the past.
panther lakes I hear are pretty competitive with some of the apple silicone.
Intel Panther Lake is a serious improvement over the previous Intel CPUs, both in energy efficiency and in GPU performance. The good energy efficiency is a good sign for Intel's 18A CMOS fabrication process.
Nevertheless, it is worrying that the computers with Panther Lake CPUs have become much more expensive in comparison with their equivalents of last year with Arrow Lake, and this before adding the hugely increased costs for DRAM and SSDs.
It is also confusing for buyers that the 300-series Panther Lake part numbers that appear to be replacements for the previous 200-series Arrow Lake in most cases correspond to lower technical specifications, i.e. a much smaller GPU and lower clock frequencies.
The Panther Lake models that have the new big and very good GPU are extremely expensive and also hard to find, despite the fact that the GPU continues to be produced by TSMC. Perhaps TSMC has raised its price and prioritizes other customers, so Intel cannot get enough big GPUs, but even the Panther Lake models with the very small GPU (much smaller than Intel has used in many years for its mobile CPUs) have become far too expensive.
Because Panther Lake introduced a few important new features that could have been interesting for experiments in software development (e.g. FRED), I intended to buy some mini-PC with Panther Lake, but I gave up because even one that would cost double in comparison with the mini-PC with Arrow Lake H from last year that I have (i.e. around $1000 as barebone, instead of around $500) would be a downgrade in specs, instead of being an upgrade.
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