Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijonman2 | Hacker News Reader

I couldn’t find an answer: what’s EUV in this context?

EUV is Extreme Ultra Violet and is the highest end manufacturing process for silicon. DUV is Deep Ultra Violet and is used for larger node silicon. Only one company makes EUV machines and that's ASML. I think I read somewhere that ASML make about 50 EUV machines per year for companies such as TSMC, Samsung and Intel. This fire obviously disrupts production of those machines but I'm not sure if they have another factory elsewhere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIiqVrKDtLc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gMdGrVteI

Two good introduction videos.

Extreme ultraviolet lithography, currently only used by TSMC and Samsung for 5nm production.

So this disruption will prevent TSMC and Samsung from expanding EUV capacity for a little while, while affecting almost nothing else. Interesting.

On the contrary, it affects almost everything else through cascading effect.

It will also of course hinder any of their would-be competitors from getting their EUV plants up and running.

Also, "affecting almost nothing else" is only true if nobody buys the chips the TSMC and Samsung make with their EUV plants. It's probably more the opposite where almost everyone who buys any sort of product with Samsung and/or TSMC chips in it (ie, pretty close to everyone) will be affected.

Extreme ultraviolet, as used in lithography : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithogra...

https://bits-chips.nl/artikel/asml-for-beginners/

– DUV: Deep ultraviolet, a wavelength range in the far ultraviolet. Chip production uses 248 and 193 nanometres.

– EUV: Extreme ultraviolet, the wavelength range between roughly 100 and 10 nanometres. In chip manufacture, used as an abbreviation for EUV lithography (also abbreviated EUVL), that is, lithography with light at a wavelength of 13.5 nanometres. EUV is expected to be used in production before 2020.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com