2024.1.13《经济学人》节选双语精读ASML【商业篇】学习指南

Does Europe at last have an answer to Silicon Valley?

【1】TEN TIMES a second an object shaped like a thick pizza box and holding a silicon wafer takes off three times faster than a manned rocket. For a few milliseconds it moves at a constant speed before being halted abruptly with astonishing precision—within a single atom of its target. This is not a high-energy physics experiment. It is the latest lithography machine dreamed up by ASML, a manufacturer of chipmaking tools, to project nanoscopic chip patterns onto silicon wafers. On January 5th Intel, an American semiconductor giant, became the first proud owner of this technical marvel’s initial components for assembly at its factory in Oregon.

【2】Like the outwardly unassuming machine, its Dutch maker is full of surprises. The company’s market value has quadrupled in the past five years, to €260bn ($285bn), making it Europe’s most valuable technology firm (see chart 1). Between 2012 and 2022 its sales and net profit both rose roughly four-fold, to €21bn and €6bn, respectively. In late 2023 ASML’s operating margin exceeded 34%, staggering for a hardware business and more than that of Apple, the world’s biggest maker of consumer electronics (see chart 2).

【3】Such stellar performance, which is set to shine brightly again when ASMLreports quarterly results on January 24th, is now routine. The firm holds a monopoly on a key link in the world’s most critical supply chain: without its kit it is next to impossible to make cutting-edge chips that go into smartphones and data centres where artificial intelligence (AI) is trained. With global semiconductor sales forecast to double to $1.3trn by 2032, every big country and every big chipmaker wants ASML’s gear. The company has become so important in the Sino-American techno-tussle that, as it recently emerged, America’s government pressed ASML to cancel planned deliveries of even its older machines to China.

【4】Yet ASML’s spectacular success is also underpinned by two other, less obvious factors. The company has created a network of suppliers and technology partners that may be the closest thing Europe has to Silicon Valley. And its business model ingeniously combines hardware with software and data. These unsung elements of ASML’s success challenge the notion that the old continent is incapable of developing a successful digital platform.

【5】ASML’s complex machines perform a simple task. They project chip blueprints onto photosensitive silicon wafers. In 1986, when its first model was delivered, individual transistors measured micrometres and its kit was almost like a glorified photocopier, explains Marc Hijink, a Dutch journalist and author of “Focus—How ASML Conquered the Chip World”, a new book. Today, with transistors shrunk by a factor of a thousand, ASML lithography gear is possibly the most sophisticated equipment ever sold commercially.

【6】ASML and its partners pulled off this incredible shrinking trick with engineering that has a science-fiction ring to it. The process starts with powerful lasers incinerating droplets of molten tin, each no thicker than a fifth of a human hair and travelling at more than 250kph. This produces extremely short-wavelength light (extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, in the jargon) which is then reflected by a set of mirrors so smooth that the biggest imperfection is no bigger than the distance grass can grow in a millisecond. To make all this worth a chipmaker’s while—the latest model costs more than $300m—and expose enough chips, the object that holds the wafer, called a “table”, has to accelerate faster than a rocket and come to a stop at exactly the right spot.

【7】To get an idea of what it takes to build such a device, pay a visit to a nondescript factory in Neukölln, a neighbourhood of Berlin. This is where ASML makes, among other things, “mirror blocks”, the main part of a wafer table. These are sturdy pieces of a special ceramic material, a square 8cm thick and measuring about 50cm on each side. Some get polished, measured, repolished, remeasured and so on, for nearly a year—until they are exactly the right shape, including allowances for the fact that they will sag by a few nanometres once installed.

【8】The factory is emblematic of the company’s unusual network of suppliers. Although its owner, Berliner Glas, was acquired by ASML in 2020, it lives halfway between being an independent company and a unit of the Dutch parent. Something similar is true of the 800 or so mostly European firms that help put together ASML’s machines. ASML owns stakes in only a few of them. Yet their interdependence makes them act like a single organisation.

小鹿酱