[HotAir] I’ve written about this before but yesterday the NY Times published an interesting piece on the EUV lithography machines produced by ASML and how those machines really determine who can manufacture cutting edge microchips.
As you probably know, there’s a concept called Moore’s Law which suggests that the complexity of microchips doubles every two years while the cost of the chips is cut in half. And for the most part that has held true since the first CPUs were introduced in the 1970s.
But cramming more and more transistors into the same physical space gets harder to do over time. With each successive generation of chips, the number of transistors packed into a square millimeter has to climb. Actually making that happen turns out to be massively difficult. In fact, it required expertise from different companies around the world to allow for the creation of the world’s first EUV lithography machines. The machine itself is about the size and shape of a bus and costs $150 million dollars each. |