![pronounced_kyle's tweet photo. I love Twitter — after posting about TSMC last week, a former ASML technician reached out to me...
His name is Daniel Hatton-Johnson, and he shared a bunch of cool behind-the-scenes stuff that you can only really learn by living it.
I asked, and he agreed to let me post his message in full:
Hi Christian,
I saw your Tweet on TSMC and why what they do is so hard. There were so many good answers and recommendations.
Background
The reason I thought to write is that I have lived in Eindhoven in the Netherlands for the last four years. I came to start a deep tech company at an incubator here (another story).
On arrival in October 2019 I had no manufacturing or production experience at all, so I got a part time evening job at ASML whilst working on the company. Then the following year moved to a company called SMART Photonics, who make Photonic Integrated Circuits. A relatively tiny semiconductor company, that has raised around €100 million to date.
I’ll mostly summarize those experiences below. I currently work as a Quality Technician at VDL Enabling Technologies Group, where we make some of the smaller machines and modules that go inside the giant ASML machines. This includes the vessel, which is the thing that vaporizes the tin droplets to generate UV light. I literally work with those and two other machines every day, the atmospheric wafer handler and the vacuum wafer handler.
————————
Eindhoven eco system
One thing to note is that all of these companies came out of Philips, what was originally a lighting company before electronics and now mostly advanced medical equipment. Eindhoven is named the city of light. Not because of light bulbs, but because there was a huge match industry from the 1840’s to the 1920’s.
Both ASML and SMART spun out of Philips, whilst VDL ETG was an acquisition by the VDL Group, a large Dutch industrial family business that also started as a single machine shop in Eindhoven in 1953, which included Philips among its first clients.
I gave this background because it gives some insight into the size and depth at least one chip making and industrial eco system here. For a long time it has attracted engineers, scientists and technicians from around the world. Then you have a very large supply chain to be able to build things and so it's easy to create companies that build things or service the companies that are building physical products. From basic things like chains, hoses, tractors and ceramics to advanced cooling, lasers and medical equipment.
Another fun fact is that Eindhoven has the highest concentration of patents per head of any city in the world. It also has the, by far, highest concentration of people with autism in the world as invention, autism, creativity and things like left handedness have been shown to be correlated. With the children of doctors and engineers the most likely to score highly for neurodivergent traits.
————————
Companies
ASML - I worked a basic technician job in a cleanroom of the servicing building so won’t
elaborate too much there. We basically used to check and ship parts to fix machines that were
installed globally.
VDL - I work on the two wafer handlers, the vessel and their spare parts. This role is fairly advanced manufacturing, but it's not too hard or intricate in comparison to making chips. The harder part is the design, iteration and prototyping when a new version of a machine gets built.
Thereafter its a fairly steady, standardized process. It then goes to ASML where they have to get those things working to spec which is pretty hard as it requires small tolerances that rely on great software to get all of the moving parts talking to each other. That’s where it really becomes rocket science again.
SMART Photonics - They are a foundry making tiny photonics chips. These chips are still relatively large compared to modern electronic integrated circuits. The reason being that light has a much longer wavelength than electrons do. The wavelength of light used in PICs is typically between 1500 nm and 1650 nm. This means that the features in a PIC must be at least as large as the wavelength of light in order to effectively guide and manipulate the light, always following a curve to take a smooth path and prevent reflection. In contrast, electrons have a much shorter wavelength, on the order of 0.1 nm so the feature size can get tiny. Meaning that the process is not just intricate, it’s unimaginably difficult to do and then to scale and have good yields. Any contamination like a tiny grain of dust on any layer can damage and destroy a photonics chip, and that same particle that would leave a photonics chip functional would likely destroy an electronic chip or two with such small feature sizes.
Much of our process was still similar and because of the larger feature size and being a lab to fab rather than a full chip fab, we did more experimentation and more manual handling than you’d ever see in a large scaled up electronic semiconductor plant.
So you got to see a wafer start from the beginning, blank and then see layers added, or removed and transformed by the process.
The base material for our foundry was mostly indium phosphide (InP), and sometimes gallium arsenide (GaAs) rather than silicon since as both materials are able to generate light. Though InP for example has comparatively high loss, compared to Silicon since it's such a great insulator meaning light propagates well though silicon waveguides. But they then need an external, usually larger light source.
With InP that can all be done on chip and [we were all in] on InP. Though the drawbacks are that the material is very brittle and the process is still not scaled like CMOS so we started with two and three inch wafers. The company has now moved to four inch wafers so with larger chips and smaller wafers, the yields don’t come anything close to electronic chips which tend to be about 12 inches across. So the costs are relatively high, but the applications such as quantum computing, sensing and detection cannot be done in silicon electronics, adding massive value to the areas where these chips are used.
As with silicon the production of a single finished wafer takes around 8-16 weeks and on the way there, there could be any number of challenges because you are using machines and materials that are undergoing nanoscale state changes. So for examples you may change the formula or your photoresist, or you could have two materials that interact well until there are changes in temperature with heating or cooling from the bake off process for example. Which could leave cracks in a layer of your chip because the materials could expand or contract at different rates or temperatures whilst being structurally connected.
Any metal or glass/silica waveguide on top of this could then have a short circuit in the electronic components and loss or scattering in the photonics components.
So you’d grow layers of InP in a huge reactor, do chemical etching, photolithography and a number of different process steps, adding and removing materials, building a working chip layer by layer.
The amount of processes involved are staggering. There are reactors for crystal growth which need to be connected to dangerous gases. This for us was generally done by experienced engineers and chemists/materials scientists who would go into those rooms with masks and oxygen tanks on. Then you have machines for photolithography that we mostly got from ASML.
These didn’t need to be top of the line due to larger feature sizes so we had older machines as they last a very long time. Then a newer one which is relatively cheap in the low tens of millions of euros.
Add to that ultra precise measuring and metrology equipment, SEM microscopes and other microscopes of varying strengths. The list of high tech machinery was endless. This all had to be maintained by experienced process engineers and technicians.
————————
The people
This is a summary of my experience as someone who was previously a layperson and went head first into this environment after a life of office work. I have a degree in sociology and did further study later in things like UX design and other things in digital and IT. Coming here was an expansive, mind bending experience. It’s like a totally different world compared to most cities.
I spent lots of time speaking to my colleagues and so many of these people were just incredible. They’d have to solve impossible problems constantly under pressure, in the middle of a batch that if ruined would take weeks to get back to the same place.
You could grab a colleague in the lunch room and ask anything about their area of expertise and the depth of knowledge and experience was generally unbelievably high. If you didn’t want to talk about work it could be a conversation about time dilation or any number of things related to the sciences as they are, or going over outstanding questions in science.
For some time I sat next to a guy who was a brilliant mathematician, trying to solve Goldbach's conjecture in his spare time. He believed only prime numbers were truly numbers as opposed to base 10, or base 12 number systems which as he said were largely culturally defined and arbitrary. That guy was incredibly interesting, as were many people there. The guy who swapped desks with him was trained in chemical engineering and was equally brilliant. These were two middle aged white guys who wore glasses and had a kind, calm demeanour, which makes you
stop believing in both ageism and talented assholes as a pathway to success.
With companies like ASML and TSMC, they have many, many more of these individuals. In fact some of our best people had come from ASML and the large chip companies like NXP. But they generally wanted more freedom, creativity and a better work life balance as the big companies require a lot of overseas travel. Those people work under immense pressure and are pretty well compensated for it.
This is mostly personal experience and it’s a little short, but I wanted to at least give some insight from one part of the global semiconductor ecosystem here in Eindhoven. I’d be happy to either talk a little more, or try to put you in touch with a colleague or former colleague who knows more.
I also have a friend working at Schunk Xycarb in the next town over, which is a company specializing in Carbon manufacturing at scale. They grow the large crystals that become the wafers for semiconductor, which again is a highly specialized process in itself.
This whole thing is a huge, huge ecosystem, and the fabrication of chips, the epicenter of it, is probably the hardest part along with creating and operating the lithography machines at scale in a way that generates profits. I have missed entire areas like mask design, testing, reliability testing, logistics, transportation design, and delivery processes for multiple customers.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F9uhvHMaQAAJrJI.jpg)
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The countdown is on! Join us for the 100th edition of Demos, Pitches & Drinks on Dec 4th @hightechcampus. In this video we revisit some of the highlights from the past 10yrs with @usono @3Dbyflow & @LifesenseGroup. More info & Register here: https://t.co/4edxKgRJJF
On October 23rd, join us for a special @dutchdesignweek edition of Demos, Pitches & Drinks @Manifestations_ 2024! A great opportunity to see how art, technology, design, & entrepreneurship come together. 📍 Veem Building, @StrijpS Floor 8 ⏰ 17:00-19:00.
@levelsio I know some people at NXP and might be able to help with a tour at the Nijmegen fab. Sent me a DM to make the connection!.
10 jaar geleden begonnen we met de Gerard & Anton Awards om veelbelovende Eindhovense startups in de spotlight te zetten. Tijdens de afgelopen editie voegden we de 100e winnaar toe. Zo’n 300 bezoekers zagen op @hightechcampus #Eindhoven TracXon de 100e award in ontvangst nemen.
Join us tomorrow for Demos, Pitches & Drinks @AIInnoCenter @hightechcampus. Experience dynamic pitches, tech innovations, & great networking from 17 to 19hr. Ready to pitch? Limited slots available—contact organizers! Register now! https://t.co/cexnwnKQwi
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alphabeats is now available for pre-order.
Pioneering neurotech for athletes, the company’s EEG headband and app combine the power of music and neurofeedback to train mental fitness.
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Demos, Drinks & Pitches, edition #93, @MicrolabEHV. Next edition May 1st, @AIInnoCenter @hightechcampus. More info: https://t.co/cexnwnKQwi. #Eindhoven #startups
Another dynamic edition of Demos, Pitches & Drinks! The energy last night at @TUeindhoven was fantastic, with innovative pitches making it yet another memorable evening. If you couldn’t make it, don’t worry – we’re there every first Wednesday: https://t.co/cexnwnKQwi
Join us for Demos, Pitches & Drinks at the Alpha Building, @TUeindhoven, March6, 17:00 - 19:00. Explore innovative projects, pitch your ideas, & network with the vibrant startup community in @Brainport_int #Eindhoven. Register here: https://t.co/cexnwnKQwi #StartupCommunity
Op de hoogte blijven van het laatste nieuws over start-ups, scale-ups en innovaties uit @Brainport_int #Eindhoven ? Mis niets. Klik hier https://t.co/BvIN3g0O1w om de 1e editie te lezen van de gloednieuwe Gerard & Anton nieuwsbrief en je te abonneren op de volgende edities!
De High Tech Piek Awards komen eraan! Nominaties & aanmeldingen zijn welkom vanaf nu. Op 11jan zetten we in het @Philips Museum weer 9 mensen in het zonnetje die hard gewerkt hebben om #Eindhoven als innovatieve locatie op de kaart te zetten. Kaarten: https://t.co/WTSzELnZ2f
Exciting lineup for the last Demos, Pitches & Drinks of the year @hightechcampus #Eindhoven on Dec 6, building 27! Connect with innovators, dive into tech discussions, and engage with the vibrant @Brainport_ehv startup scene. More info: https://t.co/cexnwnKQwi
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I really enjoyed being on this podcast🎙️It's not every day you get to discuss your favorite subject: managed serendipity. Join us in this talk about the importance of diverse and trusted connections in thriving ecosystems. Thanks Ralu @radio4brainport. https://t.co/nyhJtE2X51
I love Twitter — after posting about TSMC last week, a former ASML technician reached out to me...
His name is Daniel Hatton-Johnson, and he shared a bunch of cool behind-the-scenes stuff that you can only really learn by living it.
I asked, and he agreed to let me post his message in full:
Hi Christian,
I saw your Tweet on TSMC and why what they do is so hard. There were so many good answers and recommendations.
Background
The reason I thought to write is that I have lived in Eindhoven in the Netherlands for the last four years. I came to start a deep tech company at an incubator here (another story).
On arrival in October 2019 I had no manufacturing or production experience at all, so I got a part time evening job at ASML whilst working on the company. Then the following year moved to a company called SMART Photonics, who make Photonic Integrated Circuits. A relatively tiny semiconductor company, that has raised around €100 million to date.
I’ll mostly summarize those experiences below. I currently work as a Quality Technician at VDL Enabling Technologies Group, where we make some of the smaller machines and modules that go inside the giant ASML machines. This includes the vessel, which is the thing that vaporizes the tin droplets to generate UV light. I literally work with those and two other machines every day, the atmospheric wafer handler and the vacuum wafer handler.
————————
Eindhoven eco system
One thing to note is that all of these companies came out of Philips, what was originally a lighting company before electronics and now mostly advanced medical equipment. Eindhoven is named the city of light. Not because of light bulbs, but because there was a huge match industry from the 1840’s to the 1920’s.
Both ASML and SMART spun out of Philips, whilst VDL ETG was an acquisition by the VDL Group, a large Dutch industrial family business that also started as a single machine shop in Eindhoven in 1953, which included Philips among its first clients.
I gave this background because it gives some insight into the size and depth at least one chip making and industrial eco system here. For a long time it has attracted engineers, scientists and technicians from around the world. Then you have a very large supply chain to be able to build things and so it's easy to create companies that build things or service the companies that are building physical products. From basic things like chains, hoses, tractors and ceramics to advanced cooling, lasers and medical equipment.
Another fun fact is that Eindhoven has the highest concentration of patents per head of any city in the world. It also has the, by far, highest concentration of people with autism in the world as invention, autism, creativity and things like left handedness have been shown to be correlated. With the children of doctors and engineers the most likely to score highly for neurodivergent traits.
————————
Companies
ASML - I worked a basic technician job in a cleanroom of the servicing building so won’t
elaborate too much there. We basically used to check and ship parts to fix machines that were
installed globally.
VDL - I work on the two wafer handlers, the vessel and their spare parts. This role is fairly advanced manufacturing, but it's not too hard or intricate in comparison to making chips. The harder part is the design, iteration and prototyping when a new version of a machine gets built.
Thereafter its a fairly steady, standardized process. It then goes to ASML where they have to get those things working to spec which is pretty hard as it requires small tolerances that rely on great software to get all of the moving parts talking to each other. That’s where it really becomes rocket science again.
SMART Photonics - They are a foundry making tiny photonics chips. These chips are still relatively large compared to modern electronic integrated circuits. The reason being that light has a much longer wavelength than electrons do. The wavelength of light used in PICs is typically between 1500 nm and 1650 nm. This means that the features in a PIC must be at least as large as the wavelength of light in order to effectively guide and manipulate the light, always following a curve to take a smooth path and prevent reflection. In contrast, electrons have a much shorter wavelength, on the order of 0.1 nm so the feature size can get tiny. Meaning that the process is not just intricate, it’s unimaginably difficult to do and then to scale and have good yields. Any contamination like a tiny grain of dust on any layer can damage and destroy a photonics chip, and that same particle that would leave a photonics chip functional would likely destroy an electronic chip or two with such small feature sizes.
Much of our process was still similar and because of the larger feature size and being a lab to fab rather than a full chip fab, we did more experimentation and more manual handling than you’d ever see in a large scaled up electronic semiconductor plant.
So you got to see a wafer start from the beginning, blank and then see layers added, or removed and transformed by the process.
The base material for our foundry was mostly indium phosphide (InP), and sometimes gallium arsenide (GaAs) rather than silicon since as both materials are able to generate light. Though InP for example has comparatively high loss, compared to Silicon since it's such a great insulator meaning light propagates well though silicon waveguides. But they then need an external, usually larger light source.
With InP that can all be done on chip and [we were all in] on InP. Though the drawbacks are that the material is very brittle and the process is still not scaled like CMOS so we started with two and three inch wafers. The company has now moved to four inch wafers so with larger chips and smaller wafers, the yields don’t come anything close to electronic chips which tend to be about 12 inches across. So the costs are relatively high, but the applications such as quantum computing, sensing and detection cannot be done in silicon electronics, adding massive value to the areas where these chips are used.
As with silicon the production of a single finished wafer takes around 8-16 weeks and on the way there, there could be any number of challenges because you are using machines and materials that are undergoing nanoscale state changes. So for examples you may change the formula or your photoresist, or you could have two materials that interact well until there are changes in temperature with heating or cooling from the bake off process for example. Which could leave cracks in a layer of your chip because the materials could expand or contract at different rates or temperatures whilst being structurally connected.
Any metal or glass/silica waveguide on top of this could then have a short circuit in the electronic components and loss or scattering in the photonics components.
So you’d grow layers of InP in a huge reactor, do chemical etching, photolithography and a number of different process steps, adding and removing materials, building a working chip layer by layer.
The amount of processes involved are staggering. There are reactors for crystal growth which need to be connected to dangerous gases. This for us was generally done by experienced engineers and chemists/materials scientists who would go into those rooms with masks and oxygen tanks on. Then you have machines for photolithography that we mostly got from ASML.
These didn’t need to be top of the line due to larger feature sizes so we had older machines as they last a very long time. Then a newer one which is relatively cheap in the low tens of millions of euros.
Add to that ultra precise measuring and metrology equipment, SEM microscopes and other microscopes of varying strengths. The list of high tech machinery was endless. This all had to be maintained by experienced process engineers and technicians.
————————
The people
This is a summary of my experience as someone who was previously a layperson and went head first into this environment after a life of office work. I have a degree in sociology and did further study later in things like UX design and other things in digital and IT. Coming here was an expansive, mind bending experience. It’s like a totally different world compared to most cities.
I spent lots of time speaking to my colleagues and so many of these people were just incredible. They’d have to solve impossible problems constantly under pressure, in the middle of a batch that if ruined would take weeks to get back to the same place.
You could grab a colleague in the lunch room and ask anything about their area of expertise and the depth of knowledge and experience was generally unbelievably high. If you didn’t want to talk about work it could be a conversation about time dilation or any number of things related to the sciences as they are, or going over outstanding questions in science.
For some time I sat next to a guy who was a brilliant mathematician, trying to solve Goldbach's conjecture in his spare time. He believed only prime numbers were truly numbers as opposed to base 10, or base 12 number systems which as he said were largely culturally defined and arbitrary. That guy was incredibly interesting, as were many people there. The guy who swapped desks with him was trained in chemical engineering and was equally brilliant. These were two middle aged white guys who wore glasses and had a kind, calm demeanour, which makes you
stop believing in both ageism and talented assholes as a pathway to success.
With companies like ASML and TSMC, they have many, many more of these individuals. In fact some of our best people had come from ASML and the large chip companies like NXP. But they generally wanted more freedom, creativity and a better work life balance as the big companies require a lot of overseas travel. Those people work under immense pressure and are pretty well compensated for it.
This is mostly personal experience and it’s a little short, but I wanted to at least give some insight from one part of the global semiconductor ecosystem here in Eindhoven. I’d be happy to either talk a little more, or try to put you in touch with a colleague or former colleague who knows more.
I also have a friend working at Schunk Xycarb in the next town over, which is a company specializing in Carbon manufacturing at scale. They grow the large crystals that become the wafers for semiconductor, which again is a highly specialized process in itself.
This whole thing is a huge, huge ecosystem, and the fabrication of chips, the epicenter of it, is probably the hardest part along with creating and operating the lithography machines at scale in a way that generates profits. I have missed entire areas like mask design, testing, reliability testing, logistics, transportation design, and delivery processes for multiple customers.
![pronounced_kyle's tweet photo. I love Twitter — after posting about TSMC last week, a former ASML technician reached out to me...
His name is Daniel Hatton-Johnson, and he shared a bunch of cool behind-the-scenes stuff that you can only really learn by living it.
I asked, and he agreed to let me post his message in full:
Hi Christian,
I saw your Tweet on TSMC and why what they do is so hard. There were so many good answers and recommendations.
Background
The reason I thought to write is that I have lived in Eindhoven in the Netherlands for the last four years. I came to start a deep tech company at an incubator here (another story).
On arrival in October 2019 I had no manufacturing or production experience at all, so I got a part time evening job at ASML whilst working on the company. Then the following year moved to a company called SMART Photonics, who make Photonic Integrated Circuits. A relatively tiny semiconductor company, that has raised around €100 million to date.
I’ll mostly summarize those experiences below. I currently work as a Quality Technician at VDL Enabling Technologies Group, where we make some of the smaller machines and modules that go inside the giant ASML machines. This includes the vessel, which is the thing that vaporizes the tin droplets to generate UV light. I literally work with those and two other machines every day, the atmospheric wafer handler and the vacuum wafer handler.
————————
Eindhoven eco system
One thing to note is that all of these companies came out of Philips, what was originally a lighting company before electronics and now mostly advanced medical equipment. Eindhoven is named the city of light. Not because of light bulbs, but because there was a huge match industry from the 1840’s to the 1920’s.
Both ASML and SMART spun out of Philips, whilst VDL ETG was an acquisition by the VDL Group, a large Dutch industrial family business that also started as a single machine shop in Eindhoven in 1953, which included Philips among its first clients.
I gave this background because it gives some insight into the size and depth at least one chip making and industrial eco system here. For a long time it has attracted engineers, scientists and technicians from around the world. Then you have a very large supply chain to be able to build things and so it's easy to create companies that build things or service the companies that are building physical products. From basic things like chains, hoses, tractors and ceramics to advanced cooling, lasers and medical equipment.
Another fun fact is that Eindhoven has the highest concentration of patents per head of any city in the world. It also has the, by far, highest concentration of people with autism in the world as invention, autism, creativity and things like left handedness have been shown to be correlated. With the children of doctors and engineers the most likely to score highly for neurodivergent traits.
————————
Companies
ASML - I worked a basic technician job in a cleanroom of the servicing building so won’t
elaborate too much there. We basically used to check and ship parts to fix machines that were
installed globally.
VDL - I work on the two wafer handlers, the vessel and their spare parts. This role is fairly advanced manufacturing, but it's not too hard or intricate in comparison to making chips. The harder part is the design, iteration and prototyping when a new version of a machine gets built.
Thereafter its a fairly steady, standardized process. It then goes to ASML where they have to get those things working to spec which is pretty hard as it requires small tolerances that rely on great software to get all of the moving parts talking to each other. That’s where it really becomes rocket science again.
SMART Photonics - They are a foundry making tiny photonics chips. These chips are still relatively large compared to modern electronic integrated circuits. The reason being that light has a much longer wavelength than electrons do. The wavelength of light used in PICs is typically between 1500 nm and 1650 nm. This means that the features in a PIC must be at least as large as the wavelength of light in order to effectively guide and manipulate the light, always following a curve to take a smooth path and prevent reflection. In contrast, electrons have a much shorter wavelength, on the order of 0.1 nm so the feature size can get tiny. Meaning that the process is not just intricate, it’s unimaginably difficult to do and then to scale and have good yields. Any contamination like a tiny grain of dust on any layer can damage and destroy a photonics chip, and that same particle that would leave a photonics chip functional would likely destroy an electronic chip or two with such small feature sizes.
Much of our process was still similar and because of the larger feature size and being a lab to fab rather than a full chip fab, we did more experimentation and more manual handling than you’d ever see in a large scaled up electronic semiconductor plant.
So you got to see a wafer start from the beginning, blank and then see layers added, or removed and transformed by the process.
The base material for our foundry was mostly indium phosphide (InP), and sometimes gallium arsenide (GaAs) rather than silicon since as both materials are able to generate light. Though InP for example has comparatively high loss, compared to Silicon since it's such a great insulator meaning light propagates well though silicon waveguides. But they then need an external, usually larger light source.
With InP that can all be done on chip and [we were all in] on InP. Though the drawbacks are that the material is very brittle and the process is still not scaled like CMOS so we started with two and three inch wafers. The company has now moved to four inch wafers so with larger chips and smaller wafers, the yields don’t come anything close to electronic chips which tend to be about 12 inches across. So the costs are relatively high, but the applications such as quantum computing, sensing and detection cannot be done in silicon electronics, adding massive value to the areas where these chips are used.
As with silicon the production of a single finished wafer takes around 8-16 weeks and on the way there, there could be any number of challenges because you are using machines and materials that are undergoing nanoscale state changes. So for examples you may change the formula or your photoresist, or you could have two materials that interact well until there are changes in temperature with heating or cooling from the bake off process for example. Which could leave cracks in a layer of your chip because the materials could expand or contract at different rates or temperatures whilst being structurally connected.
Any metal or glass/silica waveguide on top of this could then have a short circuit in the electronic components and loss or scattering in the photonics components.
So you’d grow layers of InP in a huge reactor, do chemical etching, photolithography and a number of different process steps, adding and removing materials, building a working chip layer by layer.
The amount of processes involved are staggering. There are reactors for crystal growth which need to be connected to dangerous gases. This for us was generally done by experienced engineers and chemists/materials scientists who would go into those rooms with masks and oxygen tanks on. Then you have machines for photolithography that we mostly got from ASML.
These didn’t need to be top of the line due to larger feature sizes so we had older machines as they last a very long time. Then a newer one which is relatively cheap in the low tens of millions of euros.
Add to that ultra precise measuring and metrology equipment, SEM microscopes and other microscopes of varying strengths. The list of high tech machinery was endless. This all had to be maintained by experienced process engineers and technicians.
————————
The people
This is a summary of my experience as someone who was previously a layperson and went head first into this environment after a life of office work. I have a degree in sociology and did further study later in things like UX design and other things in digital and IT. Coming here was an expansive, mind bending experience. It’s like a totally different world compared to most cities.
I spent lots of time speaking to my colleagues and so many of these people were just incredible. They’d have to solve impossible problems constantly under pressure, in the middle of a batch that if ruined would take weeks to get back to the same place.
You could grab a colleague in the lunch room and ask anything about their area of expertise and the depth of knowledge and experience was generally unbelievably high. If you didn’t want to talk about work it could be a conversation about time dilation or any number of things related to the sciences as they are, or going over outstanding questions in science.
For some time I sat next to a guy who was a brilliant mathematician, trying to solve Goldbach's conjecture in his spare time. He believed only prime numbers were truly numbers as opposed to base 10, or base 12 number systems which as he said were largely culturally defined and arbitrary. That guy was incredibly interesting, as were many people there. The guy who swapped desks with him was trained in chemical engineering and was equally brilliant. These were two middle aged white guys who wore glasses and had a kind, calm demeanour, which makes you
stop believing in both ageism and talented assholes as a pathway to success.
With companies like ASML and TSMC, they have many, many more of these individuals. In fact some of our best people had come from ASML and the large chip companies like NXP. But they generally wanted more freedom, creativity and a better work life balance as the big companies require a lot of overseas travel. Those people work under immense pressure and are pretty well compensated for it.
This is mostly personal experience and it’s a little short, but I wanted to at least give some insight from one part of the global semiconductor ecosystem here in Eindhoven. I’d be happy to either talk a little more, or try to put you in touch with a colleague or former colleague who knows more.
I also have a friend working at Schunk Xycarb in the next town over, which is a company specializing in Carbon manufacturing at scale. They grow the large crystals that become the wafers for semiconductor, which again is a highly specialized process in itself.
This whole thing is a huge, huge ecosystem, and the fabrication of chips, the epicenter of it, is probably the hardest part along with creating and operating the lithography machines at scale in a way that generates profits. I have missed entire areas like mask design, testing, reliability testing, logistics, transportation design, and delivery processes for multiple customers.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F9uhzRwaQAApd1F.jpg)
Looking back at the @dutchdesignweek edition of Demos, Pitches & Drinks – it was awesome. The synergy between science, technology, art, and design again proved to be very inspiring. Thanks @Sandwoman / @Manifestations_ for having us.
The next DPD edition is happening this WED in collaboration with @Manifestations_ . This special @dutchdesignweek edition is dedicated to connecting the networks in Tech, Art & Design in @Brainport_ehv. https://t.co/vr06tCROuf
On Oct 25th, mark your calendar for the special DPD edition @Manifestations_ during @dutchdesignweek, celebrating the fusion of art, technology, design & entrepreneurship. Eager to pitch your project or startup? Simply mail to [email protected]. https://t.co/t6SsX6JoCl
Yesterday’s Demos, Pitches & Drinks @TheGate_Tech @TUeindhoven Campus, was a great success, attracting innovators, investors, & startups from @Brainport #Eindhoven. Next DPD is a special @dutchdesignweek edition in cooperation with @Manifestations_, Oct25, https://t.co/cexnwnKQwi
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