How ASML Won Lithography (& Why Japan Lost)

in the mid-1990s two companies dominated the photo lithography space both of them were japanese nikon and canon together they held three-quarter share of the market then a dutch company called asml rose to overtake these two relegating them to bid players in the industry today the two are no longer trying to compete at the cutting edge while asml is now europe's most valuable technology company in this video i want to talk about how asml took the market share and technological leadership crown and why the japanese incumbents failed to keep it but first i want to talk for a few moments about the agenometry patreon if you like what this channel does you can support the work by joining the early access tier early access members get to see new videos before they're released to the public and there is a general support tier too and signing up for that would be amazing so head on over to the patreon page and take a look i deeply appreciate anything you'd be able to sign up for thank you and on with the show a photo lithography stepper or scanner is basically a nanoscale printer that prints integrated circuit patterns onto a wafer a single wafer can hold hundreds of dies the eventual parts that go into your apple m1 or a13 chip the photolithography process goes something like this and i am simplifying here we first coat a silicon wafer with a chemical referred to as a photoresist then we use the stepper or scanner to project the integrated circuit design onto the wafer after the tool has done its job we etch away the areas that have not been exposed by the baked photoresist the process then starts over and over again until we have reached the level of sophistication that we want the photolithography machine is not the only machine used in the process but it is one of the most critical okay basics done here is the story thus far throughout the 1960s and 70s the united states dominated the photo lithography tools market the top two companies were perkin elmer and geophysics corporation of america or gca this market dominance alarmed the japanese and their government reorganized their computer industry the powerful ministry of international trade and industry gathered together the country's best optical manufacturers and ordered them to catch up to the american leaders and they did this effort is now famously known as the vlsi research project and that whole story is really interesting maybe i'll do a future video about it maybe if this one gets a thousand likes or something anyway in 1980 nikon introduces its first commercial stepper canon quickly followed these products offered superior performance at a very low price thus the two japanese companies overthrew the americans to rule the market in less than a decade at this point in time it seemed like japan's technical lead in lithography tools was insurmountable no other viable competitor was on the horizon asml was founded in 1984 as a joint venture between dutch firms asm international and phillips during this period of time the semiconductor supplier industry faced immense challenges as the economy went through various booms and busts asml lost money for the first six years of its life forcing asm to sell its shares to phillips and two banks in 1990 asml would be spun out as its own independent company despite this asml retained strong links to philips philips remains a big shareholder is located 20 minutes away and many asml employees also work there along with carl zeiss we can see these three companies has practically one block phillips's backing helped asml persist and the fledgling company managed to gain a foothold in the market by the time asml ipo'd in 1995 the company had managed to acquire 25 market share third place tied with cannon we also 25 and behind leader nikon 45 still lagging behind but then three big industry generational events in the coming years allowed them to snatch away market leadership from canon and nikon in 2001 asml developed and released its first twin scan system it is called as such because it processes wafers in two stages a measurement stage and an exposure stage in the measurement stage the system measures information about the wafer for instance its position in the machine the machine then uses that information in the exposure stage where the wafer is actually exposed to the ultraviolet light this dual wielding style allows the system to process far more wafers per hour but also adds substantial complexity to the overall system nikon and canon could not replicate this technology fast enough asml rapidly iterated on the product's early success and by 2002 the company had 50 market share of the lithography tools market the second breakthrough came with a generational shift in photolithography machinery techniques called immersion lithography this is how it works previous lithography techniques had an air gap between the wafer and the stepper immersion lithography replaces that air gap with water so now you are shooting ultraviolet light through water at the wafer you have to literally stick the lens into water yeah it sounds kind of nuts but this technique has long been used for optical microscopes it even appears in school textbooks but the industry largely ignored it until taiwanese scientist bern lin demonstrated its possible viability for reaching a 45 nanometer process node asml nikon and canon quickly went to work on commercializing the technique asml managed to do it first with the twinscan at1150i in 2003 three years later the twinscan xt 1700i the first volume immersion product came out and cemented the company's dominant position in the industry the semiconductor industry long knew that immersion lithography was a stop gap measure eventually the currently used optical wavelengths would eventually be no longer sufficient for printing the next generation of semiconductors the industry debated between multiple next generation options grouped into two categories particle-based solutions like ion beam and e-beam and x-ray-based solutions like euv as most of us know the industry ended up choosing euv as the next generation solution and the big chipmakers banded together behind asml to commercialize the technology and asml needed every bit of that help because practical systems came a decade late and way over budget canon never had a chance here and nikon largely stopped progress after 2011. i've yet to see any further updates after that i've talked enough about uv in previous videos you can go watch those i just want to say that it cemented the massive technical gap between asml and its japanese competitors these events illustrate how asml managed to win the industry however it does not quite answer the question of how japan came to lose so badly it is a tough question and there are a lot of possible answers so in this final section i want to walk through some theories and ideas proposed at various times about asml's rise and canon and nikon's fall the first theory has to do with software asml's machines have exploded in complexity over the years this statistic is kind of old but it illustrates my point in 2000 asml's products use 6 times the number of cpus and 8 times the number of sensors as their 1989 products all of that hardware needs software to run it their 1989 stepper the pas 5000 had a total of 200 million source code lines including comments their 2003 twin scan has 1.25 billion a six-fold growth a single twin scan by itself has 12.5 million lines of embedded device code the code actually orchestrating the movements of the machine's components at one point the team writing its code employed over 350 people former asml president and ceo doug dunn has previously said that their software team doubled in size every four years as its code base grew asml has managed to corral this complexity and use it to their advantage they were one of the first companies to use unified modeling language or uml to visualize and develop their software modules at a very abstract level uml was critical in helping them ship in 2000 canon and nikon for their part were never that great of software and it was not until relatively recently that the japanese company started adopting these abstraction heavy software practices it is hard not to notice that canon and nikon's market share rise came at the same time japan's entire semiconductor industry had started to gain traction in the world market japan's semiconductor industry saw its peak throughout the 1980s companies like nec mitsubishi electric hitachi and toshiba ruled the chip making market especially memory holding 90 percent of the 256 k dram market many of these companies bought their lithography tools from canon and nikon it made up their core market but starting in the 1990s these low-cost japanese exports became a political issue japanese companies built massive overcapacity and dumped it overseas at below cost the american semiconductor industry successfully lobbied to place limits on their japanese competitors combined with the appreciation of the yen japan pulled back and with that so went a great deal of nikon and canon's business this also deeply affected another large semiconductor tool supplier from japan tokyo electron it forced tokyo electron to look abroad to replenish that lost business tokyo electron largely succeeded maybe nikon and canon were not so successful canon and nikon began their existence as optics systems companies while they do develop their lithography tools entire stack the core of their work always harkened back to those lenses but as semiconductor engineering reaches the very limits of what is possible under the laws of physics engineers have to start looking for other avenues to squeeze out gains perhaps because asml outsources all of its optics r d and research to zeiss asml was able to look beyond mere optics and find new opportunities to optimize the performance of their tools resulting in a superior product that customers found worked better for them for instance opportunities relating to better utilizing new chemicals in photo resist and photo masks or the two-stage wafer swap process that would eventually create the twin scan theory number four if you're keeping count r d and industry collaboration played huge roles in asml's rise for r d the asml philips zeiss block has benefited from close ties to a critical industry research center mecca a semi-governmental nonprofit in belgium that works very closely with the industry in academia to develop new technologies they are one of the most advanced semiconductor research centers in europe just as importantly imec plays a very big role in facilitating cross-industry collaboration by helping different companies within the semiconductor industry work together to develop new standards and ideas this exposure helps asml learn how their own tools are used by their customers and how those tools interact with equipment made by other vendors even without imec participation we can see real evidence of asml's collaborative nature by looking at the number of papers jointly published by the asml philips zeiss block and chip makers tool makers and chemical makers canon and nikon on the other hand lack a similar collaborating body a measure of nikon's published papers showed that most of their papers were by themselves alone interviews note that the japanese companies do exchange information with outside partners but only those which they have been working with for a very long time and even then those exchanges were not great the customers talked to the tool makers only when there was a serious problem not when they had an idea on how to do things better there's a difference between those two it is interesting to note that the two companies got to their leading place in the 1980s because of a similar sharing of resources the aforementioned vlsi project but that project came together at the behest of the government who forced the grumbling competitors to work together and solve industry-wide problems since then nothing is good has taken his place this one has direct consequences to the immersion lithography breakthrough that helped the long canon and nikon's fall berlin discovered the theoretical pathway towards immersion lithography but the big breakthroughs in developing an actual practical commercial system came from an american researcher at mit this researcher was running experiments and critically he was running those experiments using industry standard conditions and settings something like that does not happen without the researcher meeting with industry professionals and learning how they work ties between the industry and academia and japan are especially weak compared to those in the west industry professionals are weary of disclosing trade secrets to the universities and professors in japan's universities focus more on basic science and concepts and are not particularly incentivized to see their work used in the industry japanese universities started reforming this in the mid 2000s building technology licensing organizations to gain patent revenue from discoveries mit stanford and berkeley all have similar things to help guide and profit from their discoveries for all of its strengths asml's rise could not have happened without the simultaneous decline in competitiveness by the japanese nikon and canon had the advantage but they ended up losing it and despite the plethora of theories we probably will never really know why but one lesson that really stood out to me is that we need to pay close attention to times of generational shifts immersion and euv were times when the ground underneath the industry shifted when those technological continents moved winners became losers and vice versa asml should consider this as researchers around the world push towards the next generation of semiconductor manufacturing in the coming years let me end with a bright side for japan's semiconductor industry despite canon and nikon's high profile decline there still remain many hidden industry champions in japan with legacies and proficiencies built up during those early years they made the right decisions adapted to new times and survived the fall they are not as flashy as asml applied materials or the like but they are doing all right and the industry goes nowhere without them alright everyone that's it for tonight everyone take care of yourselves out there if you want more content you can like and subscribe to the channel the feed will show you a bunch more new videos like this one to watch want to send me an email drop me a line at john asianometry.com i love reading your emails you can introduce yourself suggest a topic or more until next time i'll see you guys later

Channel: Asianometry

Views: 549,934

Keywords:

Id: SB8qIO6Ti_M

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/EarthTrash]

I have really appreciated the thought that goes into these videos.

[u/senusin]

very informative

[u/WretchedTom]

man that sword art online kirito reference 4:46 caught me off guard

[u/ItsJustUsAgain]

I'm probably way too late to get any traction, but one of the biggest reasons they became the leaders is because they bought SVGL, which formerly SVG's litho division, formerly Perkin Elmer's litho's division.

SVGL developed scanners, and were the first and best step and scan steppers in the industry. Intel was almost exclusively SVGL step and scan in the late 90s, and ASML's purchase of SVGL gave ASML all of their scanning IP and the biggest customer in the world.

That single handedly might be why they became the best, because when EUV was failing massively, Intel injected something on the order of 100s of M dollars in stock purchase to keep their funding on EUV going

Makes me think these videos aren't super great if they can miss this fact

Reference, and his site and body of work of course speak for itself

http://www.lithoguru.com/scientist/litho_history/milestones_tools.pdf

[u/[deleted]]

Do companies like Nikon even have a chance in the future?