ASML could brick Taiwan's chipmaking machines in case of uninvited guests Chipmaking equipment supplier ASML reportedly has the means to remotely disable its advanced machinery in the hands of TSMC, should China invade Taiwan. Tensions are high between mainland China and Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a rogue province that it has threatened to reclaim by force. This is a major concern as a large …
The US should never have outsourced manufacturing like that to begin with.
And why the heck is it a Dutch company that supplies the tech? I've got nothing against the Netherlands, but the USA should always have had that capability itself. We *would* have if Congress had half a brain between them.
>Maybe because they developed it? The USA did not invent all of the high technology.
The history is a lot more interesting.
In the 80s anybody could invent it, Canon and Nikon were way ahead in mask-steppers.
The various US semiconductor firms were only interested in building their own machines to service their own fabs to build their own chips, and nobody would cooperate with a competing semiconductor company. So nobody got the scale to really invest the R&D.
It's was a US strategic decision allow a company (Philips) in a small, powerless but friendly country to build up the technology to prevent the US being dependent on an Asian superpower - but back then it was Japan.
"Because they invented it, and American companies failed despite a lot of effort, to invent it."
Impossible - everyone knows the world stops at the East and West coasts. Nothing could be invented in the howling wastelands beyond the ocean.
It does seem rather remiss of the US government to be 92% reliant on something vital that they can't - or at least don't - make themselves in a pinch, though. Zapping the manufacturing facilities to keep the chips out of Winnie the pooh's paws is only a partial solution - it doesn't do anything to solve America's supply problem, no matter how large a stockpile they may have.
In the desert because Arizona is desperate to move away from agriculture — which is wildly unsustainable,1 of course — and high-tech manufacturing is one alternative. Yes, fabs use water, but they can be designed to reduce that water use somewhat through recirculation and so on, and given sufficient energy inputs3 can extract usable water from contaminated sources.
Manufacturing is potentially less wasteful of water than conventional agriculture, which obviously loses a huge amount to evaporation.
It's still a Bad Idea, as is flocking to live in the uninhabitable parts of the desert Southwest in the first place (hello, Phoenix!). But arguably it's less of a bad idea than trying to farm the damn place, and everything Reclamation spent a century doing in an attempt to make that work.4
1Because of water, of course, but not just water scarcity. Irrigation is poison; it's a long-term time bomb. Nearly all irrigation-dependent regions ruin their arable land due to salination.2 Salts are washed out of higher non-arable lands into the fields. Then first salinity limits which crops will grow (because it lowers the osmotic pressure of the water), and then it defloccinates the soil, making it much harder for plants to expand their root systems.
The Colorado River is now saltier than the ocean when it reaches its delta, thanks to irrigation water flowing back into it. The US had to build a desalination plant for it because it was destroying the delta and violating the US-Mexico treaty governing the river's use.
2Egypt is, or was until they foolishly dammed the Nile, an exception because the Nile's flooding deposits fresh low-salinity soil each year.
3Hey, one problem at a time!
4I mean, I get it. I do. On the cultural side you had a mix of Manifest Destiny, homesteading, lousy working conditions in the industrialized Northeast, the Civil War trashing the Southeast... And there's an argument for growing stuff in an area that has a long growing season (if you're not at high elevation) and tons of sunlight because it hardly ever rains, if you can get water there some other way. Sure, the soil is also poor, but first we had guano and then we had synthetic fertilizers. For short-term thinking it makes sense. In the longer term, it's someone else's problem.
Why the heck does North Carolina supply the purest quartz in the world, from which high-purity silicon ingots can be drawn?
Why the heck did Ukraine previously supply half of the world's neon gas, a critical resource for semiconductor manufacturing?
It takes a globe to make a 5nm chip.
>Why the heck does North Carolina supply the purest quartz in the world, from which high-purity silicon ingots can be drawn?
Because we understand Silicon chemistry a lot less than you would expect.
This Silicon works, the ingots we make from crucibles made from this source work.
We could use silicon from anywhere in the world, but if the wafers we make from those crucibles have an issue we might lose $Bn in chips - so why risk it ?
>Why the heck did Ukraine previously supply half of the world's neon gas, a critical resource for semiconductor manufacturing?
Because we do know about Neon. So it doesn't matter where we get the raw gas from - so we get it from the cheapest source. However we can easily switch to any other Neon supplier and purify it to the same grade.
It's more a risk thing.
We get the silicon to line the furnaces that melt the silicon to make the boule that we slice into wafers - from this single source.
So we only use a very small amount of silicon for this purpose, so we aren't super sensitive about the cost.
BUT if we used a different source and it turned out that all the silicon made from the 2nd source were bad - but we only found out once we had made M4 chips from it.....
Not to say the whole global semiconductor industry is based on superstition and placebos - but the yield went up when we wore yellow socks, and we need the yield to go up so ....
What makes you think it's a single point of failure? I don't know the exact method that the press release is referring/alluding to, but I know the tech involved and I can think of at least a few methods to render these systems pretty much FUBAR without extensive support from the Netherlands in both engineering and spare parts. All of them would require extensive systems access beyond even standard service and probably requires cooperation from local teams. If I was local and had physical access to the EUV systems it'd take about 5 minutes to at the very least make them nearly irreparably inoperable. They're VERY delicate in the grand scheme of things. Making something destroy itself that you're pumping dozens of kilowatts of power into in all sorts of ways isn't the difficult engineering ;)
> TSMC is the single point of failure. I
Probably a good idea for TSMC not to have a corporate retreat and fly on Boeing ?
Was once at a big anniversary meeting of radio experts where someone pointed out that one bad tray of chicken vol-au-vents and Nato wouldn't have any new radar systems for the next 20 years.
ASML is only one of many single points of failure in advanced-chip manufacturing. Conway describes several of them in Material World.
The wafers are produced by a single Japanese company which relies on numerous trade secrets, in a facility in the US, using feedstock which is only produced by two mining-and-refining companies from a mine in the US. If China had ASML EUV machines running under their control today, they wouldn't be able to source the wafers, unless they have in secret 1) found another mine of suitable quality (no others are known to exist anywhere in the world) and 2) re-developed the ultra-refined variant of the Czochralski process required to produce suitable wafers. That's a very big "if"; it's at least as big a step as creating their own EUV production line (which is, of course, a whole suite of specialized machinery).
There are numerous other single-supplier components and processes in the supply chain from silicon mine1 to working chip.
For now, China's better plays, if it really wanted to upset the apple-cart, would be to cripple TSMC to make things difficult for the US, Europe, and their Asian allies, and continue to use older-process ICs itself. Capturing TSMC intact (if it were feasible) would be a nice-to-have for China but primarily for the prestige; they wouldn't be able to use it for long.
1Yes, silicon is as common as grains of sand, literally. But recent-node IC processes require extremely pure silicon as an initial feedstock, and that's a lot harder to come by. And, of course, the refining process is highly specialized, and so on.
All this blather is doing is making it imperative that the mainland develop a similar capability to TSMC which by all accounts they're doing quite rapidly. In the normal scheme of things this would be just the inexorable march of competition but because TSMC is now a geopolitical plaything its actually being jeopardized by the very people who claim to have its best interest at heart.
Claiming you can remotely brick something you've sold a customer if they don't behave the way we want them to is also a sure way to make your products less than desirable. (Says a person who has just wasted a bunch of time because the missus's inkjet printer is acting up again......the manufacturer doesn't care, their response is literally "Buy a new one"....sure, but from them?)
Claiming you can remotely brick something you've sold a customer if they don't behave the way we want them to is also a sure way to make your products less than desirable.
I am afraid you are overlooking the insurance factor of a guarantee that it won't fall into enemy hands (at least not in anything even remotely like a functioning state) as that gives the enemy less incentive to invade.
I'm afraid you've overlooked the fact that a remote access/destruct feature can have flaws which allow it to be exploited by bad guys and bad gals cough Intel VPro cough.
"Give us many Bitcoins, or we will push The Button."
Or, if it's a state-backed intrusion, they might just push The Button without warning.
**Claiming you can remotely brick something you've sold a customer if they don't behave the way we want them to is also a sure way to make your products less than desirable.**
While not commonly advertized, all the telecom equipment manufacturers/suppliers ( parse : Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung, NEC and the Chinese ZTE and Huawei, along with Cisco, Juniper, Extreme, Fortinet, HPE and more ) have moved their customer support to a remote support model ( to replace the on site one ).
This means that they all have admin/root rights over all the equipments installed in $TELCO, that include being able to upload a bricking software if needed.
I'm sure we all can live with bricked Mobile Networks, Fixed Neteworks and Internet...
Note : Been there, done on call remote "unbricking" and used to try to convince $TELCO that allowing remote access for support & integration is a great thing.
...sensitive regulated technology licensed by organizations such as the US Department of Defense...
Bullshit. DoD does not regulate tech, only US State Dept (ITAR) and Commerce (EAR). Plus numerous other comparable organizations in other countries. For the so-called IDC Senior Research Director to be uttering such false statements makes IDC look stupid.
The number and nationality of all the hundreds of diverse supply and support organizations required to keep any advanced semiconductor fab running is amazing. And all of them are essential and many are single-sourced.
Picking on one (or ideating on one) is just political posturing. Presumably for (domestic) political consumption. Not that Bloomberg is above such posturing, no, not at all.
These machines are fairly well sealed and run their own filters and on their own air supply. The fab cleanroom is over-pressured. Opening an emergency exit would just trigger an "under pressure" alarm as air rushes out of the door, but the airflow will keep the majority of contaminants out of the cleanroom proper. You'd have to pull all the filters and contaminate the air supply to the systems to achieve any effect on the litho machines. Just opening the doors is not going to achieve anything other than mild inconvenience and some extra wiping down of surfaces. Even a mild earthquake probably does more to cause contamination from shaking loose accumulated dust from all cleanroom surfaces it's clinging to (there's always some dust in a cleanroom no matter the grade, it builds up over time)
It isn't clear how ASML could remotely disable equipment sitting in a factory in Taiwan, but it is understood that the huge and complex photolithography machines require regular servicing and maintenance to keep them running. According to Bloomberg, the company could, as part of a software update applied during maintenance, remotely force a shutdown, which would act as a kill switch.I obviously can't speak for ASML/TSMC, but in places I've worked that have big, expensive technical kit that have large, expensive support contracts (millions, tens of millions $$ in support contracts alone), that kit (e.g. mainframes, large disk arrays, etc.) had a live, 24x7 remote connection for support purposes back to the vendor. The vendor would receive live logs, raised exceptions, and so-on to enable them to support the hardware. They could remotely update microcode/firmware and reboot parts of the systems (e.g. the disk arrays had 4 controllers in them, so they could remotely update each controller in turn and reboot each controller with no downtime to the system). They'd often contact us to let us know there was a problem they were looking into before we ever became aware of the problem ourselves.
I would be staggered if devices worth hundreds of millions of dollars - existing DUV macines are $150million a pop, and the next gen (e.g. the one just delivered to Intel) is $350million a pop - didn't have similar arrangements. Therefore to 'remote disable' you'd really just need a 'deadman'-type switch, where if the live 24x7 support connection went down for more than a few days - a couple weeks at the outside - the machine bricks itself.
"Huawei Chip Equipment R&D Center – Shanghai ... total investment of $1.66 billion for this center and it has an area of 224 football fields, it can make room for 35000 employees." HC
"Self-sufficiency in China chip production has surged from around 5 percent in 2018 to 17 percent in 2022, and have hit 30 percent in 2023 .." VOC
Obviously they are not in a need of TSMC equipment at all, and, as it seems, they will have their OWN patent protected lithography machines very very soon.
As is, West, US, like always, like to made-up fantasmagory stories to make you run in circles endlessly. World's champion on that, indeed.
>"Huawei Chip Equipment R&D Center – Shanghai ... total investment of $1.66 billion for this center
That's about what ASML spent just to buy a small stake in its glass supplier (Zeiss) and half what it paid for the EUV laser source supplier (Cymer).
Huawei has to not only duplicate ASML machines, it has to replicate Zeiss's 200 years of glass production and lens coating expertise and it has to develop it's own version of Cymer's unique EUV light source.
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