Re:Huawei builds up 2-year reserve of 'most important' US chips
by blueblisters on Sunday May 31, 2020 @02:55PM
(#23371702)
Ah interesting. Thanks for the context!
To me, the semiconductor fabrication world is like an opaque industry where you need a significant amount of capital to do anything useful. Very happy to learn that startups are getting a chance too. Super curious to know if the company made it.
Re:Huawei builds up 2-year reserve of 'most important' US chips
by skrebbel on Sunday May 31, 2020 @03:53PM
(#23372160)
As far as I know they didn't. The r&d was in NL but the sales and marketing, as well as the funding, was in China. Last I heard our prototype machine got shipped to China, and either our work sucked way more than I think it did, or the sales people botched it (or I'm wrong and there's simply no market) but last I heard its still in boxes in a storage facility somewhere in Shanghai.
I know it's easy to say "we did great but the HQ fucked it up" so I don't want to make that claim. I honestly don't know where it went wrong (and I was way less interested in sales and marketing and entrepreneurship then, so I didn't ask).
I learned everything I know about lean and agile and just shipping from our R&D lead though. He was ex-ASML and they definitely know how to ship.
We got to a .8 micrometer error margin, which is "an enormous valley" by ASML standards but still fine for the top ~5 layers of normal semicon designs, where there's typically way fewer lanes, placed more widely apart. Again, I don't know much about chip design so I probably got all the details wrong.
Basically, yes there's a market. It's not at all as big as ASML's but it doesn't need to be. There's also a market of refurbishing old ASML/Canon/Nikon machines and repurposing for different parts of the production process (either chips or other semicon stuff like LEDs), which is what a new litho startup would compete with I think.
Note that all my knowledge about this is 5 years outdated, I now run a chat api startup :-)