Early 1990s: It was the time when it first text message was sent and Windows 3.1 saw the light of day. ASML, the chip machine manufacturer from Veldhoven, was by no means a market leader at the time.
In that decade, ASML delivered the first versions of the PAS 5500, a chip machine that is very outdated by today’s technical standards. But thirty years later, this device is far from being ready for the museum or the scrap heap: the PAS machines are still producing chips on the assembly line. In fact, they are currently unavailable.
In Linkou, ASML’s branch west of the Taiwanese capital Taipei, technicians overhaul old PAS systems, among other things. Taiwanese pop music can be heard in the corridor, and in the cramped cleanroom cabin it is a matter of trial and error. Six ASML employees in dust-free overalls crawl in and around an unscrewed lithography machine – their toolboxes fill the rest of the room.
The lithography machines are now very useful for the shortage of common chips, which can be felt in many sectors, to empty. Semiconductors for electric cars and sensors in all kinds of products – the internet of things – are not made with the latest, most advanced chip machines. The older equipment is sufficient for this, or is even better suited.
‘Old’ is therefore not a good term, according to the experts. Mature they prefer to call it in the chip industry: mature technology. Dalen Wu, factory manager of ASML Linkou: “We are overhauling 50 percent more mature systems this year than last year. The refurbished machines go to chip factories in Asia and the US. It was once the intention to scale down this branch, but the need appears to be too great: 90 percent of those first systems are still in use.”
ASML is currently at the center of the technology war between the US and China as the Dutch company provides the most advanced chip manufacturing tools. This allows you to produce lightning-fast smartphone chips and supercomputers. The US government is stepping up pressure on the Netherlands to prevent ASML from exporting advanced technology to China. But the lithography machines of the 1990s are not in question.
Only half of all wafers produced by the chip industry are exposed with older lithography, ASML CEO Peter Wennink said this month at the annual investor day in Veldhoven.
Lithography machines, in a nutshell, are complex copying machines that print patterns of chips on a silicon disk of light-sensitive material – the wafer – project. The finer-meshed that light, the more computing power can be squeezed onto the small chip surface.
The older generation of lithography machines uses light with a longer wavelength than the current standard. It’s like drawing with a large paintbrush instead of a fineliner. That works fine – and is more affordable – for the production of chips where fineness is not the decisive factor. And even though the wafers used are smaller than in state-of-the-art lithography machines, the throughput is so high that chip production is profitable.
Shortage of ‘adult’ chips
Although the chip shortages that arose during the pandemic have now been partially resolved, the automotive and industrial sectors lack mature chips. These are semiconductors that are produced with an accuracy of 28 nanometers or greater (a nanometer is one millionth of a millimetre).
By way of comparison: in Hsinchu, a city located an hour’s drive from Linkou, the Taiwanese chip manufacturer TSMC is building a factory full of the very latest lithography machines from ASML, which can expose wafers with a fine mesh of 2 nanometers. These machines are the fineliners of the chip industry.
A video of ASML CEO Wennink runs non-stop in the hall of the factory in Linkou. The sound is off. But if visitors do not realize that a Dutch company is located here on the Taiwanese business park, a pair of adult wooden shoes on the reception desk reminds them of this.
The factory in Linkou dates from 2007 and the cleanrooms are bursting at the seams, says Dalen Wu. ASML is short of space; in addition to old lithography machines, they also repair parts of newer systems here. Last week, the Veldhoven-based company announced that it is a additional factory will be building nearby, in New Taipei City.
‘Thrift store’ Eindhoven
ASML has also set up a factory for the older systems in the Netherlands. Not on the ASML campus in Veldhoven, but in a separate building, close to Eindhoven Airport. ‘The thrift store’ is what Erwin de Jong, responsible for ASML’s Mature Products and Services, calls his department.
“We are only a small part of ASML as a whole (500 million euros on an annual turnover of 20 billion), but we have doubled our turnover in four years,” says De Jong.
Nearly 1,900 PAS systems are still running worldwide. They are used intensively, says De Jong. They are mashing chips more than 95 percent of the time: 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Mechatronically, the systems seem indestructible. That is an indirect compliment to the ASML designers of the nineties. And to the original parent company. Because the model name PAS stands for Philips Automated Steppera reference to ASML’s origins as a joint venture between Philips and ASM International.
ASML is the dominant player in advanced technology, but the older PAS generation machines face much more competition from lithography manufacturers such as Nikon and Canon. Those Japanese companies are also dusting off older technology to exploit new markets.
Because there are hardly any second-hand systems in circulation and chip manufacturers rarely part with their existing machinery, ASML has now started producing new PAS machines. It concerns a modest number of devices, which De Jong would rather not share in view of the competition. “It is now more than twenty a year.”
The price is a multiple of the amount for which the PAS machines were advertised in the brochure in the 1990s – more than a million euros at the time. The systems have newer electronics and some parts have been redesigned, as they were no longer available after thirty years.
Wafers like Pringles chips
The older lithography techniques have properties that are useful in the production of silicon carbide (SiC) semiconductors, the chips that send power from the battery to the electric motor and vice versa. “The wafers for those chips are thicker and suffer from deformations – they take on a shape that resembles Pringles chips. The PAS lithography machines can handle this well,” says De Jong.
The energy transition in the transport sector and the industry drives demand for silicon carbide chips. The American company Wolfspeed is one of them big player, but European companies such as Infineon, ST Microelectronics and the Dutch company NXP also make chips with silicon carbide. Foxconn, the electronics giant from Taiwan, also wants to produce SiC chips for the car market.
But there are more uses for ASML’s thrift store. ‘Mature’ lithography is also a solution for the advanced packaging of chips – a way of bundling more computing power on a small surface. The PAS 5500 also contributes to the metaverse, an online 3D world for virtual reality glasses. De Jong: “The optical elements in the latest generation of VR glasses are made with our PAS machines.”
PAS forever
The demand for refurbished units presents the Dutch chip machine manufacturer with a luxury problem. There is already too little capacity to deliver the orders for modern lithography machines. As a result, even the largest ASML customers – chip companies such as TSMC, Intel and Samsung – have to wait a long time for their orders.
De Jong would like to produce even more different models of the PAS 5500 for the customer base that needs older technology. However, ASML is afraid of overcharging its suppliers and thus getting in the way of the production of (much more expensive) modern systems. “A matter of prioritizing,” says De Jong.
But in the longer term, things look good for the PAS 5500 thrift store, he thinks: “Our strategy used to be called ‘PAS 2030’. We have now renamed it to PAS forever.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of November 26, 2022