What’s not mentioned is that he used to work in technical roles with KLA and Applied Materials, and has been with ASML for 15 years. He’s very much an insider and knows the industry very well.
Sad that this isn't default and is said with some condescension. If you read Bullshit Jobs he goes into some history of how recent the idea of a "professional CEO" (someone who doesn't necessarily have expertise in the field that they are now top decision maker in) is. Not sure it's going to last long.
He appears to hold phd in Physics but his role in ASML was Sr Director of Marketing -> VP Product Management -> EVP EUV business Line - ASML Board Member
So, not sure how techie was he in regard of the company duties.
> That said I do wonder how much marketing a monopolist needs.
Marketing in this context means figuring out what the customer will buy, and making sure that the engineers build that.
It is very easy in this industry to build the wrong thing. Even the customer does not necessarily know what they will want or need in a few years.
A lot of the time it can mean predicting the future integration scheme, and deducing the future pain points from that. As you say, it's a very technical role, and you cannot succeed without a deep understanding of the entire process flow.
It's also a no-brainer to transition to strategic leadership, because that's basically what you've been doing the whole time.
You do not want to screw up deals with this kind of kit. The price tag of a single order can be nine digits, and it needs to be kept BSL4 clean, from first baseplate, to final install.
I heard about our company selling a whole line of steppers to a Korean company. They had to be flown out in special 747s, because BSL4, and installed on site.
Then, the customer's company went belly up.
They cut the power to the fab (Maybe like this?[0]).
I think it stands for "Bio-Level 5". I have a friend that works for a major sterilizer company, and he uses the term a lot. It may be an inappropriate term, in this context.
[EDIT] I was wrong. I should have said "BSL4", (my friend exaggerates), but the deal is that it is done under the highest clean room conditions. (I was never in that part of the company. I was in the optical part).
I wonder if the word "marketing" has a different but still correct definition here, like; "bringing a product to market".
ASML seems unlike most other companies I've heard of, since every single sale is a significant chunk of the netherlands' gnp, and they have to inform the government every single time they ship something.
The clearest example of why they are not a monopolist is that the Chinese haven't been able to copy the technology - ASML has zero monopoly power over China and China in theory has the motivation and resources to copy, but hasn't so far. Because the technology is fundamentally hard - not because of backroom tricks.
Meh most people at ASML that I know (admittedly only engineers) consider it a monopolist.
Tbf I wasn’t aware that it was an accusation. They acquired a monopoly position through hard work and risky investments, not through anticompetitive behavior.
And ok they’re not strictly a monopoly because there are other litho makers but if you need the precision of an ASML EUV then there’s no other vendor. Isn’t that kind of the definition of being a monopolist?
With no skin in the game, I’d say “monopoly” would seem less accusatory (in that it meets the definition) but “monopolist” seems more negative (in that it acts like one, which has negative connotations)
In theory, yes. But for an extremely bright, driven 18-year-old, which of these career paths looks like the better choice?
(1) Ph.D. in physics (~9 grueling years), then - if you're sufficiently awesome - ~23 years working your way up in industry to become the CEO at ASML at age 50.
(2) B.S. in Computer Science (4-5 years), then get a FAANG or near-equivalent job and start raking in the money.
And if you're extra-ambitions...you might note that every single one of Forbes current 11-youngest-billionaires either inherited the big bucks, or raked it in by founding software/crypto firms. Zero of 'em went anywhere near "uber-difficult engineering technology" stuff, like semiconductor manufacturing.
>or raked it in by founding software/crypto firms.
That's not exactly something to be proud of in life or someone to look up to. Charles Ponzi, Andrew Tate, and the dozens of other influencers also became quite wealthy by finding legal ways to part desperate people of their money.
>Zero of 'em went anywhere near "uber-difficult engineering technology" stuff, like semiconductor manufacturing.
And yet thank God we have no shortage of people who take the difficult path to working on the cutting edge technology to move humanity and the world forward instead of choosing the easy way of moving buffers around to push ads to people for big money, because we can't have a world where everybody is a webdev(satirized well by South Park).
It's pretty nuts that so many industries directly or indirectly depend on ASML, and that they have no competition.
How come companies like TSMC can't build their own machines? Is there really only one company in the world that has the required skills? Or is it only because of patents and exclusivity agreements?
The US government did a lot of EUV research through the 1990s via three national labs (Livermore, Berkeley and Sandia). Then when trying to commercialize it a consortium of US companies were involved. ASML, Canon and Nikon were also interested by only ASML was allowed in. Ultimately ASML acquired SVG and became the sole benefactor of this research at that time. ASML agreed to maintain US production and R&D as part of this. It also gives US some leverage to deny sales of that technology to China.
There is definitely some patent, exclusivity agreements and protectionism going on. But the bigger factor is, that the semiconductor supply chain is very deep and development is VERY expensive and long.
In addition to that there was a major switch from lenses to mirror in the lithography system, so everything is very new.
I know of multiple suppliers down the supply chain which had to invest billions and had to wait 10 years before they even saw a penny.
There is a reason why everybody else essentially gave up.
It’s simply decades of R&D that no other company has done. Barring maybe Canon and Nikon but they’re pretty far behind.
ASML machines are truly a marvel of engineering. And duct tape btw, but also engineering.
There’s no fundamental reason other companies couldn’t compete. Simply invest tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of man-years and there you go, a second ASML.
There’s something neat and vaguely sci-fi in the fact that we all just call them ASML machines.
Like we’re in a book and the author needs a technobabble device that is made by just one organization, but incongruously powers entire industries that are foundational to the whole economy, but obviously coming up with an actual description of the device is a bit beyond the ability of the author. So they just call it “the companyname machine” and let the reader come up with details. “Oh it uses mirrors and lenses and concentrates light in a special way that nobody can replicate.” Reality is a hack author.
The duct tape parts are probably a fantastic moat in itself - ASML's institutional knowledge of where and how to apply such duct tape solutions might be the most difficult to replicate by another company.
It's like only a couple companies know how to build large jet engines that don't melt when the heat inside them is way above the melting point of their materials...
> It’s simply decades of R&D that no other company has done.
ASML machines consist of at least two main parts: laser and lenses. Both has been engineered by third-party firms: TRUMPF (laser) and Carl Zeiss (lenses).
> Simply invest tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of man-years and there you go, a second ASML.
As it is often, you'd just need to know where to buy your start (remember MS DOS) and then you can invest a lot from your first revenues.
Canon might come up with a good different solution (13.10.2023):
>ASML machines consist of at least two main parts: laser and lenses. Both has been engineered by third-party firms: TRUMPF (laser) and Carl Zeiss (lenses).
Correction: not lasers and lenses, but EUV light-source and mirrors.
The TRUMPF laser in the EUV machines is nothing too special, but the Cymer EUV light source, consisting of blasting tin microdroplets at the right angles at speed, with said lasers, is the secret sauce.
And mirrors are used instead, because lenses would absorb the EUV radiation.
FWIW the Zeiss relationship is perfectly symbiotic, in that there’s an exclusivity deal and neither company can do without the other. For all intents and purposes you can regard ASML and (the litho department of) Zeiss as a single company.
But the ASML machines are substantially more than just some purchased parts put together. There’s a lot of unique engineering in bits that you can’t easily point at as a “part”, such as the entire metrology software - that’s the bit that measures how badly positioned and how crooked the wafer is and adjusts the laser and all stage positioning etc accordingly. You can’t buy stuff like that off the shelf, it’s all developed in-house. And they have a whole bunch of things like that, which are like part physics, part math, part mechanics, part software and part choosing/speccing (and sometimes designing) the exact right parts.
Canon’s new effort looks promising indeed btw, would be great if ASML gets some serious competition one day.
The mirrors and lasers are not the hard part, the secret sauce is the light source and getting the machines to perform at a level that makes them economically viable.
I don't think you have any idea of how hard EUV was to pull off.
They toiled for 20 years without guarantee of success. They managed to pull it off and now they own the bleeding edge process and will do for the foreseeable future. If someone wants to do the same, they can become competitors.
It's not just a question of patents, they keep almost everything about these machines secret.
Back in 2005 the researchers who worked on EUV lensing (mirrors, really) were very cynical and thought that it would never pan out. Coffee breaks were hilarious. It ultimately took a whole lot of time indeed.
That is a bit of an oversimplification of what happened. A lot of basic research was done by US labs. But it took ASML almost 20 years to convert this research into a production ready system and nobody else succeeded. And they also got some big research grants from the EU[1]
The US had an EUV project that ran like 2-3 years and cost a few millions. ASML spent two decades and billions on it. That's like saying that the Manhattan project was given to the US by Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn.
I don't believe it has much to do with patents, though I suppose it helps. They have the talent, existing knowledge and the manufacturing capabilities to make it happen. One machine, which kind of looks like a CNC machine to me, can cost $200-400million IIRC.
Another way to look at it, China would love to be able to copy their processes and has not yet been able to do so.
It’s like Apple and TSMC. At this scale, both benefit if a large customer helps funding its critical supplier’s technology and infrastructure developments. It’s a symbiotic relationship, both suffer if one has serious issues.
On one hand it’s anti-competitive because it makes it more difficult for the customer’s competitors to use leading edge technologies; on the other those leading edge technologies would be much harder and take longer to develop without the customer’s contribution.
It’s a specific part of Zeiss, it’s not like they bet the whole group on it. It’s symbiotic because they help ASML get better machines, which helps ASML get more money, a part of which is funnelled back to its suppliers. In the end it’s a risk assessment: what is the expected value if we get closer to a single partner, compared to trying for a broader market. Also, bear in mind that both sides have to keep the other working: the customer without suppliers is just as dead as the supplier without customers.
So: they depend on each other, and they get more business and make more money by getting closer and have incentives to help the other improve (so it is not an adversarial relationship). Hence, symbiosis.
The symbiosis is often in legal but specific deals.
And in the imaging and litho world surprising in the level of trust. For example, Sony actually makes a number of sensors for Nikon and other camera makers, despite having often competing products.
As far as I know it's also the only company in the world where the US goverment has a major stake in (25% I think).
Good news is that China has delivered their 8mm lithography machines and are promising 3mm sometime in the next two years. maybe this will introduce more competion down the road
> Good news is that China has delivered their 8mm lithography machines and are promising 3mm sometime in the next two years. maybe this will introduce more competion down the road
I have my doubts about this.
SMIC is still struggling with 7nm, unable to deliver at scale. 3nm in two years sounds like a leap.
What is most surprising to me is that Chinese companies have not yet successfully stolen the IP yet. Why is this? I guess the same is true with TSMC and its cutting edge chips. Do these companies just have better security, or is it the nature of the tech?
My guess is the latter. Some of the things that ASML makes are extremely challenging to manufacture, even if you know how to do it (certain pieces of the EUV systems), as well as things that come from other companies like the mirrors from Zeiss. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if China has some stolen IP, but I don’t think it would be that helpful given the above.
As far as I know they never got a single machine. So they can’t easily reverse engineer it.
They’re struggling already just to copy the previous generation DUV machines, and that’s while having a bunch of machines they can study and copy.
A lot of technology you can’t really just copy it. You need the whole supply chain and expert support around it. Like with EUV they’d need someone like Zeiss to make the mirrors. Even the parts holding the mirrors are extremely niche and extremely hard to make.
SMIC could copy older TSMC tech because they could buy the same machines and poach engineers from TSMC. That’s just not viable for EUV.
Most of the West has bailed out of the electronics race so long ago, that the experience gap in between practice, and what is told in universities is like 20-30 years now.
No university in the world will teach you how to make a modern stepper. Most of research in this space been going behind closed doors from the beginning of the semiconductor industry, and nearly completely closed since around 2010.
Only places like IMEC and few others are semi-public windows to what happens behind closed doors.
In principle, physics behind the operation of a stepper is nothing secret, components not secret, manufacturing techniques not secret, but the experience of how to arrange all of above in a way it is known to work is only available to, I would say, less than 100 people worldwide.
I want to add one word that is missing (but implied) in the many replies: light. It's that hard to make EUV Light in sufficient concentrations to burn wafers. If you could do that, you would be 85-90% of the way there.
It all worked well pre tech war, east and west semiconductor studios were customers at TSMC and TSMC was a customer at ASML. Then the US started the tech war and the world started bifurcating somewhere in the middle term into a NATOstan and BRICS world..
The question should now be how fast can innovation happen with 2 or maybe even 3 supply lines instead of 1 global supply line for semi conductors.
ASML has extremely important infrastructure. I hear a lot about ASML having something that can't be replicated without billions and billions etc. But how much of this is propaganda? Is it really true that this is the only way to run the semiconductor industry? Open up their tech, and then we will know for sure. A million people would race to make this as cheap as possible.
I’m more curious who gets to be the new CTO. Van den Brink knows the whole damn machine by heart + the people who made it, gonna be a hard gap to fill.
Multiple knowledgeable senior engineers at ASML have told me how impressively well Van den Brink understands how the damn thing works.
Given how unforgiving the average engineer is when someone in upper management doesn’t understand something (cue PHB jokes), I’m inclined to believe them.
