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EBB for 14 January: Think you know ASML? You have no idea ….

(Editor’s note: This 14 January 2025 edition of the Eindhoven Business Briefing focusing on ASML is part of our Tech Tuesday series. Dispatches covers tech because so many of our highly skilled internationals are engineers, physicists and entrepreneurs.)

We’ve just read two wildly disparate versions of reality for ASML, the second most valuable company in Europe by capitalization behind Waldorf, Germany-based software company SAP. Nothing better illustrates the difference between the way the Dutch see ASML, and the way the rest of the world sees this global semiconductor dominator.

Here’s an example. Studio 040, which is a public broadcasting entity, has a post that basically predicts 2025 will be a terrible year of decreasing demand worldwide for ASML photolithography machines.

The Brabant region as a whole is in peril because of overreliance on ASML, with a ripple effect should the semiconductor giant stumble, the story warns:

The high-tech companies in the region will only become more dependent on the chip sector in the future. And that may be dangerous. Joost Eyck and Steven Pattheeuws wrote a report on behalf of consultancy firm PWC in the summer of 2024 about the focus on the chip sector in the Brainport region. They found that it may be going too far.

So, Eyck and Pattheeuws are basically arguing that Eindhoven should focus more on other business sectors. Because you know … the future of semiconductor is so uncertain.

Yet, the core of their argument is sound. Compared even to neighboring European Union countries, the Netherlands is over-regulated almost to the point that it’s no longer competitive. Also, the automation of ASML, which assembles parts manufactured by suppliers, is surprisingly low. So, how could an ASML possibly survive here?

A post in the Wall Street Journal is far more positive, even fawning. In “It’s the Most Indispensable Machine in the World—and It Depends on This Woman” delves deeply into the ASML mystique. Or the way reporter Ben Cohen puts it, all the tech in your life is “made by a company you’ve never heard of. And it’s maintained by hidden figures like her.”

“Her” is Brienna Hall, a customer support engineer working in a fab in Boise, Idaho for ASML customer Micron Technology, responsible for fixing the room-sized ASML photolithography machines Micron uses to make chips.

Cohen has a great insight about how ASML is “the glue holding the chip business together. That’s because this one Dutch company is responsible for all of the EUV lithography systems that help make the chips in so many of your devices. Like your phone. And your computer. And your tablet. And your TV. Maybe even your car, too.”

The post contains a lot we didn’t know about ASML, including:

• ASML puts engineers such as Hall through months of “Fab Ready 2” classes in Taiwan, San Diego and Germany. Hall served a one-year apprenticeship before she was cleared to work on the EUV machine by herself. 

• Outside the Netherlands, ASML’s workday is a lot different. At ASML offices in Boise near Micron, Hall works 12-hour shifts, from 6 a.m. till 6 p.m. In the winter, she comes to work long before sunrise and leaves well after sunset, according to the WSJ post. Can you imagine that in Eindhoven? Ah, no …

• The latest ASML tool weighs 300,000 pounds and was airlifted to Micron in Boise in three 747 cargo planes.

• The latest extreme UV model photolithography tools cost about $370 million. Each.

• Hall is one of an army of 10,000 customer-support employees who maintain machines at customer fabs.

In this day of stiff posts written by GPT, Cohen’s prose flows – clever and detailed, yet never repetitious. When Hall is working in the fab on the ASML tool, “she’s often in a flow state,” Cohen writes. “Hall talks about troubleshooting an EUV machine the way Stephen Curry talks about shooting a basketball.” A must-read.

ASML is a transcendent company that mixes science and magic.

Making chips

Continuing with our “Eindhoven’s place in the amazing world of chips” theme, Financial Times has a graphically amazing explainer/visualizer on how computer chips are made. The post, “Inside the miracle of modern chip manufacturing,” shows the nearly atomic-scale chip designers are working at now. It’s a world where only three companies — Intel, Samsung and TSMC — are capable of mass producing chips powerful and small enough for today’s advanced 3 nanometer circuits for mobile technologies. And, by the way, all three are ASML customers.

Post highlights include:

• As in a crowded city, chipmakers are building up, not out, creating 3D, multi-level chips for the first time in the 60-year history of the integrated circuit.

• Engineers are moving away from building an entire microprocessor on a single piece of silicon and toward multi-chip modules (MCMs) – groups of chips with different functions built on separate pieces of silicon and bundled together to work “like a single electronic brain.”

• Just one square millimeter of a chip can contain up to 200 million transistors, with tens of billions across a chip. Manufacturers predict reaching 1 billion transistors sooner rather than later.

• ASML is the only company in the world that has the technology to etch 3-nanometer circuits on the smallest chips.

The post invokes Moore’s “Law,” Gordon Moore’s observation that chipmakers chips would double the number of transistors on an integrated circuit every 18 month while halving the price. The major obstacle these days is production capabilities haven’t caught up with physics, with fabs reporting more and more unusable chips due to trying to manufacture with nanometer precision, according to the post.

Swave raises serious Series A

We saw this on Sander Art’s LinkedIn feed:

Aaaaah! 2025! It started well with this announcement below! When my friend Mike Noonen says he is going to do something, he is going to do something …in this case raise a €27M ($28.27M) Series A funding round! This may be the largest ever Series A in Belgium, but I assume someone will tell me I am right in the comments below?! He lined up: imec.xpand, SFPIM Relaunch, EIC Fund, IAG Capital Partners, Murata North America, Inc. Existing investors must be proud: Qbic Fund | Venture Capital, PMV, imec, Luminate Accelerator.

We dug out the original news release from Swave Photonics, which was posted a few days ago.

Swave will use the fresh capital to bolster its Holographic eXtended Reality (HXR) platform, “enabling a reality-first user experience for AI-powered augmented reality (AR) smart glasses and heads-up displays.” Mike’s bet is that AR glasses will become the primary interface for AI-powered spatial computing and other applications, according to the release.

Swave is not an Eindhoven startup but is just across the border in Leuven. We have had a beer with Mike, who’s connected to marketing whiz Sander in The Valley, who’s connected to the Eindhoven ecosystem. Maybe it’s time we start thinking about the Benelux region as a tech cluster rather than Eindhoven as a walled garden.

QUICK HITS:

NXP and Honeywell team up

NXP, based at High Tech Campus Eindhoven, and Honeywell, based in Charlotte, N.C., are expanding their partnership aimed at developing advanced aviation technology and autonomous flight capabilities. NXP also just acquired TTTech Auto, an Austrian company specializing in safety software for autonomous vehicles.

Dazzled by ASML, we don’t write enough about NXP, one of the most valuable (54 billion euro market cap) and innovative chipmakers in the world. Look for more in the future.

HTCE had a good year!

Who doesn’t love a great infographic? Well, we found one that sums up High Tech Campus Eindhoven’s 2024, the 25th anniversary of Europe’s largest R&D campus.

You can read if for yourself, but we’d like to point out a few amazing numbers:

• 55,500 subscribers in aggregate for all the Campus social media platforms

• 56 total HTCE-sponsored events, including Lunch and Learn presentations by standout entrepreneurs such as Intrinsic ID founder Pim Tuyls, Carbyon founder Hans De Neve and LUMO Labs co-founder Andy Lurling.

• 710 million euros in VC funding by Campus companies.

Who is this Lale Boyd who created this insightful piece?

Bill Gates makes big investment in DAF

We never saw this coming. Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates just invested $100 million of his estimated $104 billion fortune in DAF truck’s PACCAR holding company. We wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d acquired NXP or some tech company but a maker of over-the-road trucks?

Bill Gates acquired 1 million shares of PACCAR stock at about $100 each, according to Truckstar, of which we’re loyal readers.

We flashed back several years to when he and Bruce Springsteen were arm wrestling over the old Philips estate and realized that American billionaires seem to be keeping an eye on Eindhoven. Witness the purchase of High Tech Campus by Howard Marks’ asset management giant Oaktree Capital.

Interesting!

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Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.

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