Neutro a chi?
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/28/inside-the-mind-bending-tin-blasting-and-hyper-political-world-of-microchips>
A small town in the Netherlands hosts the only factory that produces the
only chip-making machines that generate a type of light found nowhere
naturally on Earth: extreme ultraviolet, a light emitted by young stars
in outer space.
This light, known as EUV, is the only way to make one of the world’s
most valuable and important technologies at scale: cutting-edge
semiconductor chips. The factory is forbidden from selling its EUV
machines to China.
Below we explain how the chips are made, why they have become the focus
of the US-China trade wars, how Taiwan was drawn into the maelstrom, and
what could come next. The answers take us from deep underground to outer
space, from the dirtiest places in the world to the cleanest, from the
hottest temperatures to the coldest, from man-made structures smaller
than a virus to equipment so large it takes three planes to move, and
finally, to a state in physics that is two opposites at the same time.
How are they made?
Chips are made up of layers of thin, flat pieces of silicon – called
wafers – that hold electric circuits. These circuits are comprised of
billions of switches called transistors. Highly complex, powerful chips
containing these networks of transistors are commonly referred to as
semiconductors.
If you want to make semiconductors, you’ll need $380m. This is the cost
of the latest EUV machine from Advanced Semiconductor Materials
Lithography (ASML). Shipping is a nightmare: the machine is so large and
so delicate that it requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes
and 20 trucks to transport it from the Dutch factory in Veldhoven. All
this to create and focus light with wavelengths almost as short as
X-rays, with enough energy to penetrate solid objects.
Chipmakers strive to meet a prediction called Moore’s law: that capacity
– or the number of transistors on a chip – tends to double every two
years. If chips are to stay the same size, and ideally get smaller, this
means that transistors must be ever finer.
ASML’s machine carves the patterns into the silicon wafers that hold the
transistors. The finer the patterns, the more computing power you can
pack on to a chip. Marc Assinck, a company spokesperson, likens light
wavelengths to the thickness of a pen stroke. The more detail you want
on a page, the thinner your pen should be. EUV light has a wavelength so
narrow that it is invisible to the human eye and passes right through
most materials.
The light is produced by firing a laser at microscopic balls of tin. The
tin evaporates into plasma, and the plasma emits light, which is moved
through the lithography machine, hitting specially made mirrors. The
light is shone through a “mask”, which is the pattern of one layer of a
chip, on to the wafer. The area exposed to light hardens and the area
not exposed 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 layout, only the
features of this layout can be just 25 nanometres: smaller than
particles of influenza viruses, which are about 100 nanometres. EUV and
other lithography machines carve the patterns of these layers, one by one.
The machines aren’t easy to make. Like chips themselves, they’re
assembled in dust-free rooms, the cleanest spaces on earth. Chips
function at the level of atoms: a single speck of dust can render them
useless.
Why is Taiwan so important?
ASML makes the machines that make chips, but it doesn’t make the chips
themselves. That is done, chiefly, by another remarkable company with
another unremarkable name: TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Company, which produces nine in every 10 of the world’s most advanced
semiconductors – including those that power iPhones. Because Taiwan
makes and supplies so many of the US’s semiconductor chips, the US has
an added interest in protecting Taiwan amid concerns that China will invade.
In 2022, the US convinced the Dutch government to place export controls
on ASML’s machines, restricting their sale to China. To date, ASML says,
no EUV lithography machines have been shipped to China, which means that
unless – or until – it invents its own EUV lithography machines, China
will be working with technology a few years older, and less powerful,
than that of western countries – deep ultraviolet lithography, for
example, instead of extreme ultraviolet. These machines can still
produce very complex chips at scale – just not as complex.
Artificial intelligence, another technology in which the US and China
are fiercely competing to advance, relies on among the world’s most
complex and powerful semiconductor chips. The leading designer of these
chips is an American company called Nvidia. Its chips are produced by
TSMC on machines made by ASML.
China’s lack of access to EUV lithography explains why the debut of the
Chinese chatbot DeepSeek came as such a shock to markets. A Chinese
company produced a product as powerful as Chat GPT with less advanced –
cheaper – technology. DeepSeek claims that it cost just $6m to train,
compared with the billions of dollars spent by US companies to do the
same thing.
“The US believes that AI will be a transformative technology, impacting
nearly every sector of the economy,” says Chris Miller, the author of
Chip War: the Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. “So it
doesn’t want China to gain an advantage.”
It is also crucial for defence and intelligence. The Chinese People’s
Liberation Army has made “significant progress” in its efforts to use AI
in combat in recent years, according to the Centre for Security and
Emerging Technology.
But not everyone believes that China’s access to ASML’s machines should
be restricted, including ASML.
Asked at a Bloomberg conference in October how much the restrictions
were really about security threats, its CEO, Christophe Fouquet, said:
“More and more people are asking themselves this exact question … Is it
really about national security?”
The debate might not need to continue for long: in 2024, Chinese company
Shanghai Micro Electronics Company (SMIC) revealed that, a year earlier,
it had filed a patent for an EUV lithography machine.
Where do rare earths come in?
China boasts other advantages over 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, Gallium
demand is projected to increase more than 350% from 2015 levels.
Germanium demand is expected to 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 reason why Donald Trump is pressuring Ukraine into handing
over its rare earths in exchange for aid, and why, after Trump’s first
meeting with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, the pair announced
they had agreed to launch “a recovery and processing initiative” for
rare earths.
Will quantum chips change everything?
Then there are quantum chips. Quantum chips would, in theory, allow
computers to solve problems much, much faster than the world’s current
super computers. This is because instead of being the equivalent of on
or off, or a zero or a one, quantum chips can be both states at once –
and every state between. A common explanation is a maze: a normal
computer would find the path through a maze by testing each option, one
after the other. A quantum computer could test all of them at once.
So far, quantum computing has been achieved only in limited
circumstances. But Microsoft announced this month that it had built a
chip that could mean quantum computers might be built within years
rather than decades.
Meanwhile, China’s public spending on quantum technology is four times
that of the US, according to the Mercator Institute of China Studies, a
European thinktank. And the chips are not made with EUV machines.
Instead, quantum chips are made by machines that carve patterns into
chips using electrons. And China has these machines.
China also has a resource often overlooked in the chip debates, says
David Reilly, professor of physics and the head of the University of
Sydney’s quantum programme.
“The key to all of this is people,” he says. Breakthroughs happen
because people see a need, and know what the existing ways to meet that
need are, and can imagine what they might be.
“There are a lot of smart people in China. They produce a lot of Stem
graduates,” he says. And those graduates tend to do undergraduate or
postgraduate degrees at the top US, Australian, European universities
before returning.
“I don’t want to say governments are sort of blind to that, but we do
focus a lot on the transfer of tangible stuff,” he says. “Inventions
don’t happen in a vacuum.”
