NFR The crazy shit that makes your cell phone work...

[SilverFly]

... and everything else in the digital world.

Normally I try to keep things mostly fishing related but had to share this. Not just because it's what I do for a living, but also because it's literally driving the advances in everything.

ASML is the only company making the $200 million machines needed to print every advanced microchip. Here's an inside look

ASML is the only manufacturer of EUV lithography machines, which revolutionized semiconductors. Here's an inside look at the company relied on by chipmakers.

www.cnbc.com

I worked for this amazing company in the late 90's and have been with one of their main customers since. Unfortunately I found this article linked from another about potential impacts to the semiconductor industry due to shortages of neon, which half of the global supply comes from Ukraine.

 

[SurfnFish]

thnkx for the share...never would have thought the industry is single source dependent for it's premier chip machines. Hopefully it is robustly guarded.

Bit like building 2N data centers with all that redundancy ....someone with a tool to open the lid and a grinder to cut the fiberr can pop open a street vault the ISP fiber runs through and in minutes take the data center down.

 

[SilverFly]

E

thnkx for the share...never would have thought the industry is single source dependent for it's premier chip machines. Hopefully it is robustly guarded.

Bit like building 2N data centers with all that redundancy ....someone with a tool to open the lid and a grinder to cut the fiberr can pop open a street vault the ISP fiber runs through and in minutes take the data center down.

Yup. Plenty of delicate, expensive naughty bits. Even on the older DUV stuff I work on (although not cutting edge, I can safely say toasters aren't paying my salary). Plenty of pucker factor with optics and front surface mirrors. One tick of a wrench can cost a half mil.

 

[SurfnFish]

E

Yup. Plenty of delicate, expensive naughty bits. Even on the older DUV stuff I work on (although not cutting edge, I can safely say toasters aren't paying my salary). Plenty of pucker factor with optics and front surface mirrors. One tick of a wrench can cost a half mil.

my oldest son a PM in the beta phase of building fully remote controlled self-contained robotic surgical suites...transport anywhere with suitable bandwidth...ideal for battleground and remote rural areas...

during a single decade of managing data center construction shifted from stacking hundreds of 100K Sun box's to thousands of 3K blade servers...all thanks to better and cheaper chips..

 

[SilverFly]

my oldest son a PM in the beta phase of building fully remote controlled self-contained robotic surgical suites...transport anywhere with suitable bandwidth...ideal for battleground and remote rural areas...

during a single decade of managing data center construction shifted from stacking hundreds of 100K Sun box's to thousands of 3K blade servers...all thanks to better and cheaper chips..

Accuracy wouldn't be my concern with remote robotic surgery. Bandwidth and delay time are a different story.

Even the systems I work on use fiber optics to maximize bandwidth and minimize control loop delay. And that's over distances of a just a few meters within the machine itself. Granted human responses are glacially slow compared to digital control, but when the surgeon is potentially halfway around the world, I could see it being a problem.

I would imagine the sensory feedbacks such as scalpel pressure have to be nearly identical to what the surgeon would feel if he was doing it by hand. Amazing how far we've come.

 

[wanderingrichard]

thnkx for the share...never would have thought the industry is single source dependent for it's premier chip machines. Hopefully it is robustly guarded.

Bit like building 2N data centers with all that redundancy ....someone with a tool to open the lid and a grinder to cut the fiberr can pop open a street vault the ISP fiber runs through and in minutes take the data center down.

Didn't that happen to the Verizon /Comcast node in Lakewood a few years ago ??

 

[kerrys]

Bit like building 2N data centers with all that redundancy ....someone with a tool to open the lid and a grinder to cut the fiberr can pop open a street vault the ISP fiber runs through and in minutes take the data center down.

A number of years ago I was given a tour of the Westin Building in downtown Seattle. During the tour guy showing us around opened up the “meet up” room. This was where all the fiber that came into and going out of the Westin was connected. In essence a gigantic fiber optic vault. It was protected by a standard door lock. That was it, a keyed door lock. One guy with some large wire cutters could have literally destroyed the entire communications network of the west coast and beyond in a matter of a few minutes.

 

[SurfnFish]

The entire South Pacific telecommunications fiber bundle comes ashore at a small OR coastal town with a service shack above it with a standard metal door. Minutes to take down the entire Pacific Basin east flow traffic.
Built a high security data center for DOD use, N2+1 redundancy, highest possible at the time. Had to obtain DOD security clearence to do so. Tapped two seperate utilitiy districts to bring in dedicated power, two seperate ISP's to bring in T3 bundles as well. Part of the contract was the ISP street vaults to have hardened entrance hatches, an expensive retrofit on our dime. The data center? The one that monitors US cell calls...yes, they really do that.
Our power and communications grids remain ridiculously vunerable. A determined troop of boy scouts could take down large sections of it.