IDK about Philips but ASML follows US export restrictions due to a deal it agreed to when it bought a US company a few decades ago, yes.
> Is the TSMC part of the stack that special in terms of actual IP (versus more squishy organizational know-how)?
I don't want to go into too many details as I work in the Intel Foundry but it's certainly both. We'd be very happy to know how TSMC does some specific things, let me put it that way. At the same time, our execution has been dubious since 10 nm.
From Wikipedia:
> In 1997, ASML began studying a shift to using extreme ultraviolet and in 1999 joined a consortium, including Intel and two other U.S. chipmakers, in order to exploit fundamental research conducted by the US Department of Energy. Because the CRADA it operates under is funded by the US taxpayer, licensing must be approved by Congress.
So, banking is not exactly something that the US can use to coerce a European company. There are much more effective avenues for coercion, though. But IIRC, in this case, the US gov basically convinced the Dutch gov that making ASML adhere to US restrictions would be in the best interest of both of them, and not much coercion was necessary. After all, both countries are on the same side when it comes to the system conflict with China.
Philips has only kept its expertise in medical devices and a large pool of patents for many technologies (MPEG-2, H264, Ambilight, BluRay, OLED, etc.)
and for taiwan, US has pledged to its security in case of invasion would defend no matter what
Maybe with TSMC building chips in the US, that'll be one less reason for the US to defend Taiwan.
we talking about geo politic here. if china attack taiwan so would be north korea (this is their best chance)
for south korea and japan this is their existensial crisis, having china and north korea close to their home even for a kilometer is basically death sentence
You cant forget also US literally spends billions of dollar to keep balance of power in Europe,Middle-East and Africa
do you think US would ignore Asia where 30+-% world trade and resources happen??? you dnt need expert to figure it out
by borrowing 155mm shells from South Korea? cute.
Even high level people in the plant still aren't that useful. What's useful are the insanely expensive, insanely complicated extreme-ultraviolet lithography equipment from ASML. Nobody in the world makes the stuff they do. At least, that we know of. It wouldn't surprise me if the NSA has funded designing and building an EUV lithography system, or just stole the designs from ASML. We know they do a lot of their own ultra-miniature silicon, so they have a strong interest in this sort of tech.
Depends what you mean by "adopted". Pretty sure Intel had EUV prototypes before TSMC (or at least very close), but it was slower to transition its high volume production to it due to execution issues.
> The real tech breakthroughs came from ASML
I know this how the media portrays it now a days but there's so much more to semiconductor manufacturing than lithography, especially since the serious slowdown of lithography scaling with around 193 and 193i litho.
Great example is GlobalFoundry which sent its EUV machine back because it realized it could not compete on the R&D needed to keep up with the other foundries.
by that I mean shipping production chips leveraging EUV
EUV by ASML was not possible until there was a technology to create focusing lenses for it. Intel decided not to "wait" and use their existing technology to beat everyone.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/japanese-scientis...
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/new-stamping-chip...
On the nanoprint technology: as far as I understand it, this will have economic advantages in trailing nodes but is not currently seen as a way to scale past EUV.
No, no it's not.
When semiconductor manufacture moved to Asia, this was generally done under a "technology transfer agreement", which was an explicit agreement for US companies to transfer their (usually older) tech to an independent local company who would then be allowed to manufacture it and develop it. This is how TSMC started, by doing a deal with Philips to manufacture for them but also to trained on the tech and to be allowed to use it themselves.
This TSMC US fab (and Samsung's new fab) are not under such an agreement, it is directly run by TSMC with no explicit goal to transfer technology. I think it was a mistake for the US CHIPS act funding to go to such a venture without a clause for technology transfer back to a US company.