Technology

And the nations Press Secretary to the President did a degree on a softball scholarship. Fusion power imminent!

The EU does not have the military capacity to protect Taiwan.

That's not mentioning that the EU is not a military alliance. That's the first political challenge to tackle.

Anyhow, the channel ‘Asianometry’, has a video covering the physics of EUV machines. They are an incredible linchpin of our modern world.

So true. This stuff is absolutely mind-blowing. Especially if you are old enough to remember how some of that seemed like almost unsurmountable problems. Now the solution are used in mass production.

In the meanwhile, EU also have to focus on manufacturing of the chips themselves in the long run, instead of depending on a 20 million nation.

Given how the US has become more and more isolated as it turns hostile towards immigrants and what is called the Global South, of course the Mainland Chinese will befriend and establish trading deals with any country alienated by Trump. Like, for example, Taliban Afghanistan's mineral deposits.

These machines are made only here. They are owned by a company in the Netherlands, though.

That's just the imperialists telling on themselves. They don't consider what is Taiwan's as Taiwan's, but as being made exclusively for the US' benefit.

Using shorter and shorter wavelengths of light to etch chips with a higher density of transistors.

so, no jetpacks?

Average East-Asian news cycle:

China: “We are preventing the export of rare earth minerals to strengthen our country.”

US: “We are imposing tariffs to strengthen our economy.”

Japan: “22-year-old undergraduate turns a leaf into a battery.”

Cutting edge chip making is several different processes all stacked together. The nations that are roughly aligned with the western capitalist order have split up responsibilities across many, many different parts of this, among many different companies with global presence.

The fabrication itself needs to tie together several different processes controlled by different companies. TSMC in Taiwan is the current dominant fab company, but it's not like there isn't a wave of companies closely behind them (Intel in the US, Samsung in South Korea).

There's the chip design itself. Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, and a bunch of other ARM licensees are designing chips, sometimes with the help of ARM itself. Many of these leaders are still American companies developing the design in American offices. ARM is British. Samsung is South Korean.

Then there's the actual equipment used in the fabs. The Dutch company ASML is the most famous, as they have a huge lead on the competition in manufacturing photolithography machines (although old Japanese competitors like Nikon and Canon want to get back in the game). But there are a lot of other companies specializing in specific equipment found in those labs. The Japanese company Tokyo Electron and the American companies Applied Materials and Lam Research, are in almost every fab in the West.

Once the silicon is fabricated, the actual packaging of that silicon into the little black packages to be soldered onto boards is a bunch of other steps with different companies specializing in different processes relevant to that.

Plus advanced logic chips aren't the only type of chips out there. There are analog or signal processing chips, or power chips, or other useful sensor chips for embedded applications, where companies like Texas Instruments dominate on less cutting edge nodes, and memory/storage chips, where the market is dominated by 3 companies, South Korean Samsung and SK Hynix, and American company Micron.

TSMC is only one of several, standing on a tightly integrated ecosystem that it depends on. It also isn't limited to only being located in Taiwan, as they own fabs that are starting production in the US, Japan, and Germany.

China is working at trying to replace literally every part of the chain in domestic manufacturing. Some parts are easier than others to replace, but trying to insource the whole thing is going to be expensive, inefficient, and risky. Time will tell whether those costs and risks are worth it, but there's by no means a guarantee that they can succeed.