<story><title>Japanese companies fight for share of EUV chip technology sector</title><url>https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Electronics/Japanese-companies-fight-for-share-of-EUV-chip-technology-sector</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hinkley</author><text>As much as the US sits around hand wringing about manufacturing being outsourced, does anyone have a good perspective on how this has played out in Japan? From our perspective, they&amp;#x27;re one &amp;#x27;generation&amp;#x27; of outsourcing from us, two if you count Taiwan, and we&amp;#x27;ve had at least South Korea and Mainland China since then.&lt;p&gt;I got a little taste of their recession in the 1990&amp;#x27;s, but not much information since then. Are they as worried now as we were when Toyota ate everybody&amp;#x27;s lunch?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>totalZero</author><text>I have been thinking about this a lot recently, and I think Canon and Nikon, both of whom produce Deep UV machinery (ie, equipment that uses a laser wavelength about an order of magnitude wider than EUV&amp;#x27;s 13.5nm), have an opportunity due to demand for legacy foundry processes. They are a tiny part of the photolithography equipment sub-sector, but the present moment is marked by overwhelming demand for semiconductors for automotive applications, and those chips aren&amp;#x27;t running on leading-edge nodes like TSMC 5nm or Intel 10nm (there&amp;#x27;s no reason for them to). If I were the CEO of a global automaker, I&amp;#x27;d be buying legacy (22nm and older) foundry equipment in order to make chips in-house because the eventual product mix transition (ICE vs EV) means I&amp;#x27;m going to need more custom semiconductors than ever before.&lt;p&gt;The semiconductor industry is so complex that it depends upon companies in many nations, including Japan. No one nation owns the semiconductor lifecycle, but each part of the process is dominated (but not entirely owned) by one nation. Japan dominates wafer production. One company in the Netherlands dominates photolithography equipment. The United States dominates processor design. China dominates device assembly. Korea dominates NAND. Taiwan dominates foundry. Companies in all of these places are laying out a bunch of CapEx so clearly there&amp;#x27;s an anticipation of a rising tide that lifts all boats, rather than a rejiggering of market share that hurts one economy (forgetting China for a second) while helping another.</text></comment>
<story><title>Japanese companies fight for share of EUV chip technology sector</title><url>https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Electronics/Japanese-companies-fight-for-share-of-EUV-chip-technology-sector</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hinkley</author><text>As much as the US sits around hand wringing about manufacturing being outsourced, does anyone have a good perspective on how this has played out in Japan? From our perspective, they&amp;#x27;re one &amp;#x27;generation&amp;#x27; of outsourcing from us, two if you count Taiwan, and we&amp;#x27;ve had at least South Korea and Mainland China since then.&lt;p&gt;I got a little taste of their recession in the 1990&amp;#x27;s, but not much information since then. Are they as worried now as we were when Toyota ate everybody&amp;#x27;s lunch?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Scheherazade</author><text>Although your question has merit for this case specifically as ASML is a Dutch company there is very little hand wringing about outsourcing. For the forseeable future the Dutch are going to toe Washington’s line. In fact in some ways it’s desirable to throw middle powers a bone every now and then as it gives Washington an additional geopolitical bargaining chip that can be more easily called.</text></comment>