"We are wearing these clothing, not to protect ourselves from the environment, but to protect the machine from the contamination created by us."2
This was the sentence I came across while researching lithography techniques. Lithography stands at the center of the semiconductor manufacturing, which is often times critically scrutinized as the most important bottleneck during the entire production process. Remarkably, only one single company, are capable of producing the high-end semiconductor printing machine, known as EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) lithography machines. While the broader process of semiconductor production has not fundamentally changed from its origins over 60 years ago, relying on the principle of printing transistors using light and chemical reactions, what has changed is the scale. The level of precision, the wavelength of the light, and the complexity of materials involved have advanced dramatically.
The Dutch company ASML (Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography) headquartered in Veldhoven, holds a staggering 100% market share in cutting-edge lithography equipment. At the time of writing, I reached out to ASML to inquire about the possibility of a research visit. However, due to the current surge of global interest surrounding the semiconductor industry, the company no longer has the capacity to accommodate such visits. ASML’s EUV machine is often touted as one of the most complex machines ever built, with each costing over $150 million, resulting in only a handful of manufacturing companies capable of buying such machines. Accompany by German optics company ZEISS, which provides specialized mirrors with surfaces smoothed until atom level, the machine shoots 13.5 nanometers of short-wavelength light to print incredibly tiny circuit patterns onto silicon wafers.
In effect, semiconductors are politically charged: they are built on artifacts that have politics in Winner's sense, artifacts over which nations bargain and compete. The U.S. government's recent export bans on advanced chips to China, due to export controls imposed by the United States, also prohibited these advanced EUV machines from being sold to China. While ASML is a Dutch company, many of the critical components used in its machines are sourced from the U.S., giving the U.S. government leverage to restrict where the machines can be exported. Since these machines are the sole method of producing high-end semiconductors, the CEO of ASML stated that it will halt the Chinese semiconductor industry for 10 to 15 years2. One or two chokepoints in this supply chain can affect technological progress worldwide; this concentration is risky.