20 years of restarting life

Chapter 3666 Xiao Yangming's Persuasion
The next morning, Zhao Chang'an and his entourage flew to the Netherlands, with Ye Yiyi accompanying them.

Ye Yiyi and Ye Ziyu both work for the Ye family in Stockholm and several other joint venture investment companies. As girls, they are destined to get married, so the pharmacy does not need them to hold positions, so that their families will not need to train replacements in the future.

This is why Zhao Chang'an wasn't very interested in their initial proposal to invest in Taihang Pharmaceutical, because neither of them had ever truly entered the pharmaceutical industry, let alone understood the current global decline of the traditional Chinese medicine industry.

The reason the two women invested in Tianjin was because their families wanted to provide them with a good future and a suitable husband, so that they wouldn't end up as useless ornaments and breeding machines in their husband's family.

More than two years have passed since they returned to China from Tianjin in a sorry state. They joined this investment company. Ye Ziyu has performed well and has become the deputy manager of the investment department, while Ye Yiyi has been working in the audit department.

Since she had decided to return to China to start her own business, Ye Yiyi simply resigned and followed Zhao Chang'an. Ye Ziyu also wanted to resign immediately, but she still had work to finish, so she could only postpone it.

ASML was founded in 84, originally named ASM Lithography, a joint venture between Philips and chip manufacturer Advanced. Its headquarters are located in Feldhofen, a satellite city under Eindhoven in the Netherlands, and its offices are located in a row of leaky show flats in the backyard of Philips' headquarters.

Eindhoven has a population of only 24, yet it boasts 46% of the Netherlands' patented technologies. Thanks to the powerful presence of ASML, it has been hailed by Forbes magazine as 'the world's most innovative city, a world-class creative Silicon Valley.'

This is also the birthplace of Philips (1891). When Philips cut its business scope in the late 1980s, it launched the ASM Lithography, a stepper motor that converts electrical pulses into angular displacement. When the stepper driver receives a pulse signal, it drives the stepper motor to rotate a fixed angle in a set direction. However, due to its obscurity, the market did not accept it, and Advanced chose to withdraw from the market because of the long-term losses of ASM Lithography.

After Philips acquired full ownership of ASM Lithography, it separated the company and renamed it in 88, abbreviating ASM Lithography to ASML. Subsequently, Philips headquarters moved to Amsterdam and ceased investing in ASML, leaving it to fend for itself.

ASML was able to finally have a decent office and R&D space by taking advantage of the large number of empty buildings left by Philips. Then, in a do-or-die situation, it launched the PAS5500 lithography stepper, which uses an i-line light source and has an initial resolution of 0.35 micrometers (350 nanometers).

After the first PAS5500 was purchased by IBM for chip manufacturing for the System/390 server, and the System/390 became a bestseller, proving the stability of the PAS5500 and its features such as low cost, small size, and ease of use, ASML began to receive a flood of orders from all over the world.

Moreover, even twenty years later, when Zhao Chang'an traveled back in time, for over thirty years, although the PAS5500 had long since ceased production, more than 90% of the PAS5500 lithography machines sold by ASML were still in use for manufacturing semiconductor chips with less stringent linewidth miniaturization requirements.

In the following years, as ASML continuously improved and upgraded the PAS5500, introducing higher-resolution i-line, krypton fluoride (KrF), and argon fluoride (ArF) systems, its former parent company, Philips, made a fortune. In 97, facilitated by Philips and driven by the eagerness of the European and American semiconductor industries to break free from their dependence on Japanese semiconductors, the US also set its sights on ASML. With numerous companies investing and ASML successfully listing on the Amsterdam and Gotham Stock Exchanges, ASML began researching extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. In 99, the ASML EUV lithography machine R&D alliance was established, and the following year, the financially powerful ASML acquired the American lithography machine manufacturer Silicon Valley Group (SVG), entering the more refined 193-nanometer field in addition to its original flagship product, the PAS5500.

At the SPIE Microlithography Conference at the end of last year, due to the dominance of Nikon and Canon, the mainstream development direction of 157nm deep ultraviolet laser wave (DUV) stepper lithography machines was still the technological improvement in pure nitrogen.

Instead, it did not advocate trying 157nm deep ultraviolet laser waves in a liquid immersion state for immersion lithography technology.

Since the meeting, ASML's R&D department has been embroiled in various disputes, with significant disagreements over whether to begin 157nm immersion R&D.

"The current problem is that if we choose to conduct research and development in a 157nm pure nitrogen environment, Nikon and Canon have already invested billions of dollars in this area and conducted research and development for several years, and they also hold a large number of patents. Even if we eventually invest a lot of money and manufacture it, how can we compete with them? Even if we can compete, there are some patent barriers that cannot be bypassed. Do we still need to buy patent licenses from them at high prices?"

Xiao Yangming shook his head and said to Zhao Chang'an, "My contract expires this July. Regardless of whether ASML intends to renew it, I've decided to leave. The arguments of the past month or two have offered no hope of success. In my view, ASML will ultimately become a failed attempt and a joke for the US to regain its leading position and control in the global semiconductor industry. Of course, it's not entirely a joke; they can use ASML as a backup to threaten and break Nikon and Canon's future pricing power and monopoly in 157nm DUV. This achieves one of the politicians' goals, but for us tech people, it's like following in someone else's footsteps, eating their garbage and wasting our time."

Xiao Yangming was an international student who went abroad from Fudan University. He was a classmate of Wang Yu, Zhao Chang'an's advisor in their freshman year. They also went to MIT to study together. After that, he worked in the semiconductor industry in Europe and America for nearly ten years. He was not yet thirty-five years old, but he already had a lot of gray hair and wrinkles on his face that did not match his actual age.

Four years ago, Tang Wenxuan wanted to revitalize the school's microelectronics major. He sent out a batch of invitation letters to outstanding young teachers from Fudan University who were still working in the semiconductor field. Xiao Yangming also received one, but unlike Wang Yu, he did not choose to return to China. Instead, he continued to participate in the upgrade and development of the PAS5500 krypton fluoride (KrF) light source.

Today, when Xiao Yangming met this junior student who had traveled a long way, he immediately poured cold water on Zhao Chang'an, saying that he was preparing to leave ASML and didn't want Zhao Chang'an to plunge headlong into it.

The reason why Europe and the United States are investing so heavily in technical elites across various industries and fields is to curb Nikon and Canon. As Chinese people, why would we bother to come and spend money to help Europe and the United States?

This is a restaurant located near Amsterdam Airport. Xiao Yangming came all the way from Feldhoven to see his junior schoolmate, hoping to persuade Zhao Chang'an not to get involved in this thankless and costly affair.

Yang Yixin, Ye Yiyi, Qiao Hang, and the others went to the hotel that Mina had booked in advance to rest.