The Chip Insider®– UV’s Geopolitical Horizons
Summary: EUV’s Geopolitical Horizons
The challenges to EUV on the visible horizon are not technical. Nor are they demand related.
As for the technical, this week, Intel’s Naga Chandrasekaran noted that Hi-NA had reached a “new readiness milestone with (its) first high-volume logic product,”… A day later TSMC's C.C. Wei answered… “High-NA is a very good tool…” So, ASML’s barriers at the leading edge of Hi-NA are not technical. Intel has it in volume manufacturing and TSMC is working on it. Hi-NA is well past the ‘if’ question and is in the early phases of answering the ‘when.’
As for demand questions, the only question is large die limitations from the half field, which I’ve said for years would slow Hi-NA adoption but, if not, limit it. The other argument against demand was cost. Most notably, SemiAnalysis vociferously argued in 2023 that Hi-NA’s adoption would be challenged by its cost. My argument has always been that its value outweighed its cost. Confusing the cost and value is a strategic error… With DRAM ... So, the demand is there even if TSMC has the luxury of waiting on it maturing, with its classic use of the ‘second mouse to the trap gets the cheese’ strategy.
Geopolitical barriers are the biggest challenge to ASML’s growth as their grip on lithography technology is one of critical chokepoints in the world of semiconductors and downstream AI needs… TSMC importance as a semiconductor chokepoint is unmatched at the wafer link in the demand chain…
By reductive logic: The world runs on images printed with ASML lithography tools… EUV’s geopolitical horizon is clearly threatened by this. ASML, as well as the governments of the Netherlands and the EU, is caught between China and America... It’s no secret that both China and the US have pressured the EU in many ways. Focusing on ASML, the MATCH Act (Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware), if passed, would attempt to control their shipments extraterritorially with US Law… some alternative scenarios for ASML, the Netherlands and the EU:
Scenario 1: ASML/Netherlands… Scenario 2: ASML/Netherlands… Scenario 3: ASML/Netherlands… So, you shouldn’t be surprised if … the MATCH Act gets … quietly buried in the trash can of history.
“There are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns” — Donald Rumsfeld
