alt Hacker News> By betting on extreme ultraviolet lithography long before it worked, ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips.
Makes one wonder: Would we be much better off of worse off if we reshaped society to do more of things, where a new technology is unlikely to work but highly beneficial in the limits? Would we sooner have 10 additional ASMLs or waste a lot of resources?
Replies
I mean, it’s been tried; a reading of relevant historical texts would give you lots of ammunition to support either argument.
We could have more ASML's immediately if we eradicate the desire to covet technology for one in-group, over another.
> reshaped society
Invalidate all of ASML's patents = get cheaper chips, sooner.
It is intellectual property which gives some of us the ability to build these things and sell them to others - get rid of this phony concept and we can have more nice things...
Big gambles have big risks. It's the gambler's folly, after a big win (ASML's EUV) to say, gee, we should have bought more lottery tickets! Next time, it all goes on red!
What is no longer mentioned is that ASML made another big gamble at the time they started on EUV. They decided to make an all-in-one chip making machine that took silicon and output chips (instead of matrices of chip circuits laid out on a wafer).
On paper, the machine would save a lot of money for the fab houses. IRL: no one asked for it, and no one was willing to risk their entire production on a single, untried, swiss army knife of a fabricator.
The whole program was a wash. People were reassigned and the project died a very quick death. ASML lost a ton of money on this misguided attempt, but not enough to choke them.
So, they rolled the dice twice, and one gamble paid off handsomely. If it went the other way, they'd be a smaller company, and Moore's Law would be overshooting reality. If neither paid off, they'd be DOA.