A small town in the Netherlands hosts the only factory that produces the only smart machines that generate a type of light found anywhere naturally on earth: extreme ultraviolet, a light emitted by young stars in space.
This light, known as Euv, is the only way to manufacture one of the most precious and most important technologies in the world: cutting-edge semiconductive fleas. The factory is prohibited to sell its EUV machines in China.
Below, we explain how the chips are made, why they have become the object of the American-chinois trade wars, how Taiwan was attracted to the maelstrom and what could come next. The answers take us from the deep subsoil to space, from the dirty places in the world to the cleanest world, from the hottest temperatures to the coldest, from artificial structures smaller than a virus to such large equipment that it takes three planes to move, and finally, to a state in physics which is two opposites at the same time.
How are they made?
The shavings consist of layers of thin and flat silicon pieces – called wafers – which contain electrical circuits. These circuits are made up of billions of switches called transistors. Very complex powerful fleas containing these transistor networks are commonly called semiconductors.
If you want to make semiconductors, you will need $ 380 million. This is the cost of the last EUV machine from the advanced lithography of semiconductor materials (ASML). Shipping is a nightmare: the machine is so large and so delicate that it requires 40 goods containers, three freight aircraft and 20 trucks to transport it from the Dutch Veldhoven factory. All this to create and concentrate light with wavelengths almost as short as X -rays, with enough energy to penetrate solid objects.
Flea manufacturers are trying to respond to a prediction called Moore’s Law: this capacity – or the number of transistors on a chip – tends to double every two years. If fleas should remain the same size and ideally smaller, it means that transistors should always be finer.
The ASML machine sculpts the patterns in the silicon plates that keep transistors. The more the models are rocket, the more you can wrap a computing power on a chip. Marc Assinck, company spokesperson, compares the light wavelengths to the thickness of a pen. The more you want on a page, the more thin your pen should be. The EUV light has a wavelength so narrow that it is invisible to the human eye and passes through most materials.
Light is produced by pulling a laser on tin microscopic balls. The tin evaporates into the plasma, and the plasma emits light, which is moved to the lithography machine, striking specially manufactured mirrors. The light is brilliant through a “mask”, which is the motif of a layer of a chip, on the edge. The area exposed to the hardened light and the unpresentation area is dissolved in a chemical solution, leaving behind a 3D pattern.
Think of a chip like a building with 100 floors. Each building takes four months to produce, and each floor has its own provision, only the characteristics of this provision can only be 25 nanometers: smaller than the influenza virus particles, which are approximately 100 nanometers. The EUV and other lithography machines cut the patterns of these layers, one by one.
The machines are not easy to do. Like the tokens themselves, they are assembled in dust-free rooms, the cleanest spaces of the earth. The fleas operate in terms of atoms: a single grain of dust can make them useless.
Why is Taiwan so important?
ASML makes the machines that make fleas, but that does not make the chips themselves. This is done, mainly, by another remarkable company with another banal name: TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which produces nine out of 10 of the most advanced semiconductors in the world – including those with power iPhones. Because Taiwan manufactures and provides so many semiconductor tokens in the United States, the United States has an additional interest in protecting Taiwan in the midst of concerns that China invade.
In 2022, the United States convinced the Dutch government to place export controls on ASML machines, restoring their sale to China. To date, says Asml, no EUV lithography machine has been shipped to China, which means that less – or until it invents its own EUV lithography machines, China will work with technology a few more and less powerful years than that of Western countries – a deep ultraviolet lithography, for example, instead of the extreme ultratiolet. These machines can always produce very complex fleas on a large scale – but not as complex.
Artificial intelligence, another technology in which the United States and China are fiercely competing to move forward, is based on the most complex and powerful semiconductive fleas in the world. The main designer of these chips is an American company called NVIDIA. Its chips are produced by TSMC on the machines manufactured by ASML.
The lack of access from China to EUV lithography explains why the beginnings of the Chinese chatbot Deepseek were such a shock for the markets. A Chinese company has produced a product as powerful as GPT chat with less advanced – cheaper – technology. Deepseek says it costs only $ 6 million to train, compared to billions of dollars Spended by American companies to do the same thing.
“The United States believes that AI will be a transformative technology, which affects almost all sectors of the economy,” explains Chris Miller, the author of Chip War: The Fight for the most critical world in the world. “So he doesn’t want China to get an advantage.”
He is also crucial for defense and intelligence. The Liberation Army of the Chinese people has made “significant progress” in its efforts to use AI in combat in recent years, according to The Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
But not everyone thinks that China’s access to ASML machines should be limited, including ASML.
Asked at a Bloomberg conference in October how much the restrictions really focused on security threats, his CEO, Christophe Fouquet, said: “More and more people ask themselves this exact question … Is it really a question of national security?”
The debate might not need to continue for a long time: in 2024, Chinese Shanghai Micro Electronics Company (SMIC) revealed that, a year earlier, he had a patent for an EUV lithography machine.
Where do the rare earths enter?
China has other advantages compared to Western countries in the race to produce chips. In addition to silicon, semiconductors require so-called “rare earths”-in particular germanium and gallium. By 2030, the demand for gallium should Increase more than 350% compared to 2015 Levels. The demand for Germanium should double over the same period. China produces 98% of the world’s raw gallium and more than two -thirds of the world’s raw Germanium.
This is one of the reasons why Donald Trump puts pressure on Ukraine to hand over his rare land in exchange for aid, and why, after Trump’s first meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the couple announced that they had agreed to launch “a recovery and treatment initiative” for rare earths.
Are quantum chips change everything?
Then there are quantum chips. Quantum chips in theory would allow computers to solve problems much, much faster than current super computers in the world. Indeed, instead of being the equivalent of on or deactivation, or a zero or one, quantum chips can be both states – and each state enters. A common explanation is a labyrinth: a normal computer would find the path through a labyrinth by testing each option, one after the other. A quantum computer could test them all at the same time.
Until now, quantum computer science has only been obtained in limited circumstances. But Microsoft announced this month that he had built a chip This could mean that quantum computers could be built over the years Rather than decades.
Meanwhile, China’s public spending in quantum technology are four times that of the United States, according to The Mercator Institute of China Studies, a European reflection bank. And the chips are not made with EUV machines. Instead, quantum chips are made by machines that sculpt the motifs in flea using electrons. And China has these machines.
China also has a resource often overlooked in the flea debates, explains David Reilly, professor of physics and chief of the quantum program of the University of Sydney.
“The key to all this is people,” he says. Percées occur because people see a need and know what existing ways are to meet this need and can imagine what they could be.
“There are a lot of smart people in China. They produce many STEM graduates, ”he says. And these graduates tend to do undergraduate or third cycle diplomas in the best American, Australian and European universities before returning.
“I don’t mean that governments are somehow blind to that, but we focus a lot on the transfer of tangible things,” he said. “Inventions do not occur in a vacuum.”