Comment by hagbard_c
2 days ago
Yes, I got a tour of their factory back in the day when I was editor for a number of IT-related magazines. Close to everything was made there in that factory from the metal housing for the machines to the circuit boards - photoresist, exposure, etching, cleaning, printing, conformal coating, through the pick-and-place machine, through the wave solder bath, testing and mounting in the chassis. In the Netherlands, in a relatively modest factory hall. If it could work then - and it did, for a while - it should be possible to do that now without the compulsive urge to outsource everything.
Wow, that’s very cool. Was there an ecosystem in NL for this sort of company at the time, and is this where ASML came from / has its roots?
No, ASML was spun out of Philips (as was e.g. NXP)
As hencq already mentioned ASML and NXP were spinoffs from Philips, to be specific from the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium [1] or NatLab for short. What something like e.g. Bell Labs was for the USA the NatLab was for the Netherlands: an industrial research and development organisation where theoretical research and product development were integrated into the same organisation. Apart from the already mentioned ASML and NXP spinoffs it was also where the Compact Disc [2] was developed. NatLab was disbanded in 2001, the facilities now house a business park (High Tech Campus Eindhovem [3]) where both ASML as well as NXP have a presence.
[1] https://grokipedia.com/page/philips-natuurkundig-laboratoriu...
[2] https://grokipedia.com/page/Compact_disc
[3] https://grokipedia.com/page/High_Tech_Campus_Eindhoven