The World's Most Complex Machine

3 days ago (worksinprogress.co)

For anyone interested in the topic I highly recommend this Veritasium video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0

  • The Veritasium video is good but their "newscast" style with constant back-and-forth cuts to talking heads can make the presentation a bit disjointed.

    The more straightforward video of ASML EUV is from Branch Education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2482h_TNwg

    Because that vid gives an overview of the whole machine, it gives context to what each scientist is talking about in the Veritasium interviews.

  • Great video and I think the only way to truly grasp the complexity of EUV lithography as a layman.

If there's really such a bottleneck around ASML, why not design some extra chips for legacy processes that presumably already have well known design workflows?

I mean we're not talking AMD FX and Core 2 Duo here, it's Raptor Lake and Zen 3, it's perfectly viable and still being sold in droves right now.

  • That’s what the likes of AMD with their chiplet design have been doing.

    There’s also the issue of older process nodes not being profitable enough anymore, which explaines why at the height of the chip supply crunch older ARM chips were in short supply but there was ample stock of the 20nm feature-sized RP2040.