Why neither Asia nor the US has produced a rival to ASMLThe reason is that the technology behind EUV machines is a chain of almost impossible steps, all of which have to work at the same time. Modern chips are made by printing patterns, layer by layer, on to silicon using light.
To do this, engineers first need to create a form of light that does not occur naturally. Powerful lasers are fired at microscopic droplets of molten tin, turning them into plasma hotter than the surface of the Sun. That creates a pulse of extreme ultraviolet light, which is then reflected off a series of mirrors, each made with atomic-level precision and taking months to make, before the pattern is finally transferred to the silicon wafer.
The hardest part to replicate is the optics. EUV-grade mirrors are produced by a single supplier: Carl Zeiss SMT. They are the product of decades of tightly integrated development between Zeiss and ASML.
I wonder if we'll reach a point at which it's just too expensive to always have chips that are twice as fast as last year's, and we have to make software more efficient.