How to Make Computer Chips from the Ground Up 1-3

How to Make Computer Chips from the Ground Up 2/3

Questions and answers below:

Q: Are the service providers for the components of manufacturing the same as those for more mundane components?

Different components of varying complexity are manufactured by different companies. A company doing finished assembly typically wouldn’t be manufacturing the smallest things like bolts, washers, hoses and screws. Those are generally bought in bulk from suppliers who specialise in those areas.

A large company like the VDL Group has many businesses that assemble products of varying complexity, it does not go down to the level of individual components unless they are large parts that go through CNC machines.

If a company is more high tech, they’ll assemble things that are at least at a minimum level of complexity, whereas a hose company may provide various types of rubber or metal hoses that adhere to strict tolerances and cleanliness as required per part.

The same would go for bolts, screws, washers and other singular pieces. One supplier would likely try to look for economies of scale in certain parts. But again, they may supply to a vehicle manufacturer with no clean room grade or approval needed at all.

Those same bolts or hoses would need certification and supplier approval so that you know they have a process in place to ship those simple parts at scale to cleanrooms. In some cases for the highest cleanliness grade, meaning they would have to arrive with zero particles or contamination of any kind.

For this, there’s a company called HQ pack that has buildings around the city supplying many of the local companies.

Either way, things look similar on the factory floor of a cleanroom and of normal factories. Stackable plastic ‘RAKO’ boxes full of general parts are stored in the factory to match orders.

Often the standard small parts like screws, bolts and washers will always be in stock, whereas other parts tend to come in for the particular machine or process, even hoses as different lengths are required depending on the type and model of machine you are building.

Q: Do both have/require military clearance/background checks? And any anecdotes...

ASML (Part time whilst at inPhocal) - For this role I did require a background check from the local municipality as we would be handling parts from this service building that may go by air freight once they left the warehouse. Not to mention we were handling sensitive, crucial and sometimes incredibly expensive parts from the lithography machines.

For a short period of maybe two weeks before starting at SMART Photonics I worked on the other side of the building ASML shared with DHL, split so that DHL could handle the logistics for trucking and air freight etc, while ASML warehouse employees would organise their side and sort products to go into and out of the adjacent cleanroom, where they would be processed at different grades of cleanliness.

Most of the ASML warehouse employees could operate the forklifts and other electronic vehicles as well as having the training to work in the cleanroom, so everyone would work between both as demand required. Myself included.

In addition to a new background check for this temporary role, I had a certificate that allows you to deal with air freight and we worked in a separate area of this huge warehouse in a giant cage that had a wall length electronic gate which was only opened and closed when materials or people were moved in and out of it.

Next I went to SMART Photonics, where I eventually moved into quality after working in a general logistics role. ASML and DHL are both huge companies, but at SMART I was employee number 77.

Life at a scale up proved to be very different and gave huge opportunities for learning across all departments as the company grew.

Back then at SMART we had a couple of little cars, I would transport small amounts of materials and tools between two production sites, as well as any other work that needed to be done in our department.

As I’m a bit of a generalist this did include ordering equipment and materials for our cleanroom along with a colleague who later joined from ASML. We were very familiar with the clean pack and contamination control best practices after our time there.

The SMART Photonics office and cleanroom are still based at the former Philips research Lab, now called the High Tech Campus, in building 29, though I think they recently moved due to continued expansion. It’s the same building where the Blue Ray disc was invented, for those old enough to know Physical CDs for movies.

This job was pretty handy as inPhocal is based in a building just across the way, HTC 27, in the offices of the incubator, High Tech XL. That way it was still easy to work full time and attend meetings or events around working hours.

After some time I moved from logistics to a combination of that and quality technician. I would move materials and inspect them as they were going through the line, but it was mostly end of line once they were ready to ship.

Unless there was an issue during production, in which case I would get an emergency batch from the line, or from R&D. This could well be a lot of work at the last moment, but that’s how things go in manufacturing, which compared to any previous job I’d had was very high stakes. Especially when scaling a new technology.

After 2.5 years at SMART Photonics I got a new role at VDL Enabling Technologies Group, the place where the smaller ASML machines and modules are built. That includes the part that generates the UV light by vaporizing tin, the vessel, and the smaller wafer handler.

Again, just before starting there, I took an in-between role at another VDL company, VDL Bus and Coach which is just south of the city. This was a big departure from high tech, and was only for one month but it was incredibly insightful in that short time as I’ll elaborate on below:

Q: What are the scale and speed at which they truly operate? Turnovers etc?

The scale and speed that a company operates really does depend. With ASML it was just parts, tools and carriers for servicing machines. A lot moved through that building on a daily basis, but it's hard to say exactly how much of what because of the fact it was just parts and a section of a machine at most.

The same goes for DHL which was colocated for the actual transit in and out of the trucks for road and air freight, in a huge shared/split warehouse.

Then at SMART, as its a chip foundry you’d have wafers moving through multiple stages and taking (ideally) 8-12 weeks to finish as you added different materials and put them through different processes. That’s the most complex thing I’ve personally seen being made.

Wafers are constantly going through different processes in the production line and at the end of the line involving measuring tools and microscopes. As nano structures you can’t just look at the physical parts in the same way you would with a large human scale machine.

It was also a very new technology so the company was transitioning ‘from lab to fab’, that is working at the intersection of research and scaling quantum materials into everyday use.

At VDL they do contract manufacturing, so most of the invention and design would be done by, or with the customer. Then it was building and process. While it is high tech the business was more about units through the door. Which is itself a very hard process.

I’d seen carriers for parts before, but had no idea how complex and truly massive, the carriers and tools could be for these large machines. It was mind boggling.

You’d have tool engineers designing tools and lockings that would keep the machines steady in transit and allow you to lift them with cranes and other interesting ways of moving sometimes huge things around and then outside.

The smaller, less complex machines can go out at far higher rates than the bigger ones. Those are both harder to build, harder to mount and harder to move. they also require longer more detailed physical checks and testing by more experienced people.

For example, You might expect a line to produce 10 of the simpler machines per week, Perhaps five per week of an intermediate machine and 1-2 of the largest most complex machines. Which is staggering if you think about it. This is assuming a warm start and a line full of partially assembled machines.

So some things are built in the scale of weeks, and some are built in days. Interestingly, the biggest and smallest things are what take the most time, since those are the places where there is most complexity.

In my experience, the Vessel (UV light source for lithography) and more so a photonics chip were the hardest things I’ve seen being put through production.

Watching the buses being made was really cool because of the scale. I worked in the diesel hall but would go over to the new hall to watch the electric bus line and ask the technicians and engineers questions.

Electric assembly had far fewer moving parts. Those frames looked so much more elegant and there was just less of everything compared to diesel.

It was also very clean compared to the diesel hall, but still nothing like a cleanroom. However the difference there was stark when going from one side to the other.

The diesel line had slowed from its heyday so I came to learn. The guys were putting out impressive numbers before things stopped due to covid, and then came the immediate transition to electric vehicles as customers pivoted towards sustainability.

In the diesel hall, a frame would come in from a company down the road and then you’d literally see every last part added. Axels, suspension, wheels and engines would be fitted. The AC system, and then windows. Then in the next part of the line carpets, flooring, the toilet system and onwards.

That was fascinating because everybody kind of understands vehicles as we see them everyday, but seeing one built from scratch and seeing the components as they come in and then go into a bus was pretty cool.

I couldn’t choose which line was more fun to watch as they were both fascinating for different reasons. There is nothing like being part of a process where you create real things, which is the same for most of the companies here.

Buses and coaches lacked the prestige of semiconductor and mechatronics. But seeing vehicles rolling off of the line and then driving out of the factory to go and carry people around cities and countries was intensely satisfying.

Q: Do people from the fab industry transition there or do they remain separate?

Yes people do change industry because so much of it is just process and understanding how to implement those processes. This would typically be easiest in the warehouse logistics because that doesn’t vary too much between companies.

But I did have colleagues move from Mars (Chocolate/sweets) and Friesland Campina (Dairy) move into the high tech sector. Of course it takes time to get familiar with a new industry.

That said, the more experience you have in a certain industry the better. Especially semiconductor, where the most senior and/or experienced technicians have the same or higher salaries than some engineers depending on seniority.

I moved from quality in semiconductor to quality in mechatronics. Semiconductor fabrication was far more interesting and we got to use better tools, but the process, reporting and feedback was pretty similar.

Q: Do people move around between companies?

Yes. My first job was at ASML. At SMART Photonics two former colleagues, technicians from ASML then joined. Of course there are other people with more past connections from other companies but this is my experience.

At VDL ETG, I was joined by two former colleagues from SMART Photonics, and three from ASML, so yes it’s incredibly common to move around companies that are in the same, similar or complimentary industries.

For example semiconductor mechatronics at VDL ETG and semiconductor chip fabrication at SMART Photonics are very complimentary for many processes.

Specialists, like materials scientists and chemical engineers would likely stay in semiconductor though. Specialist research scientists who work with nanostructures, crystal growth and layer deposition would probably stay in semicon too as would the experienced process technicians.

It’s more complicated, specialised and lucrative than some other general engineering processes.

Most lucrative and opportunity laden of all though is ASML. After the slow decline of Philips, which built this city and supply networks with partners, ASML grew to become the new local, regional, continental and global behemoth.

The question is who is next, or will ASML continue to innovate beyond lithography into new areas over the next 20-30 years

Or what companies will end up spinning out of ASML in the next half century as ASML, VDL ETG (Acquirer of Philips ETG), SMART Photonics, NXP semiconductor and others that came out of Philips. We seem to live in a predictably unpredictable world.

How to Make Computer Chips from the Ground Up 3/3

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Last Wednesday, instead of my usual 35km countryside ride, I cycled around the city to show how Dutch urban planning supports a dense, liveable industrial ecosystem. I started in my neighbourhood, Strijp-S, where the first Philips glass factory (for light bulbs) was built in 1916 — the site grew to include radio, television, research and box-factory operations under the old company credo, 'van zand tot klant' ('from sand to customer'). Many of the original buildings are now offices, apartments and small production spaces, with much of the industrial character preserved.

From there the route wound past dozens of interconnected companies — logistics firms, cleanroom packaging suppliers, gas and materials providers, precision machining shops — all within a few kilometres of each other. A couple of numbers stuck with me: the UPS depot near the airport can handle 29,000 parcels an hour, and the Netherlands runs the largest inland shipping fleet in Europe, carrying over a third of the country's freight tonnage by water. DAF, one of Europe's largest truck manufacturers, builds around 70,000 trucks a year not far from the same route, and nearly every bus in the city is built by VDL in Valkenswaard, just south of Eindhoven.

What struck me most was the maintenance, not just the density — potholes from a hard winter are usually fixed within a day or two, and the cycle lanes get cleared multiple times a day in snow so people can keep commuting by bike. I did that commute myself for a while, 14km each way from Strijp-S to VDL Bus and Coach in Valkenswaard, and it was genuinely just as easy year-round on a bike as it had been by car.

VDL buses at Eindhoven Bus Station