The World's Most Complex Machine

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The World's Most Complex Machine

mellosouls

Comments (129)

kens
Is the ASML machine actually the world's most complex machine under some metric, or is this a claim that someone made up? I.e., did someone actually compare the ASML machine to the Space Shuttle, LHC, Internet, and so forth and show that it is more complex under some definition? (I've done various historical questions, so I'm sensitive to how statements are sourced.)An orthogonal question is what makes sense as a measure of complexity. One could use "number of parts" (whatever that means): NASA says the Space Shuttle has 2.5 million moving parts, while the article says the ASML machine has over 100,000 components. Another issue is how to deal with composition. A TSMC fab is obviously more complex than a lithography machine since it contains a lithography machine, but maybe the fab doesn't count as a "machine". Another issue is complexity vs parts: a 32-Gb DRAM chip has about 68 billion transistors and capacitors, but it's not extremely complex, since it's mostly the same thing repeated. And then there's the question of distribution: can you really count the Internet as one "thing"?
_nhacker
Hey, author of the piece here. Glad people seem to have enjoyed it. If you're looking for more sources on ASML/EUV I put together a bibliography of things I looked at while writing the piece https://neilhacker.com/2026/04/28/asml-article-bibliography/
Amorymeltzer
It's been mentioned before, but Chris Miller's Chip War from a few years back is an excellent, very-readable book on the topic. Goes into depth on the history and development of chips and their production. He did the rounds on the interviews back then, and it's definitely worth a read. The EUV stuff is great, but I particularly liked his history on how the USSR was always going to lose and how integral Apollo really was.
maxalbarello
For anyone interested in the topic I highly recommend this Veritasium video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0
Levanta
Big idea → good for thoughtful comment
thelastgallon
I thought the power grid is the most complex machine. The power grid is a gigantic machine spanning a country or significant parts of a country. It includes all the power production plants, millions of miles of transmission and distribution lines, substations for transmission and distribution, and billions of devices consuming power for residential and industrial use. The grid ensures these billions of devices are operating at 60 Hz frequency—all the time. The grid's primary function is to maintain this frequency, no matter what.
lijok
ASML are not the chokepoint for chips. Zeiss are. ASML can hire more engineers and build more machines. Zeiss cannot hire more mirror grinders. And noone wants to train as one.
xattt
> To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks.Is this just restating the size of the same shipment three times?
jstummbillig
> By betting on extreme ultraviolet lithography long before it worked, ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips.Makes one wonder: Would we be much better off of worse off if we reshaped society to do more of things, where a new technology is unlikely to work but highly beneficial in the limits? Would we sooner have 10 additional ASMLs or waste a lot of resources?
EvanAnderson
The Omega Tau podcast visited ASML and did an episode a number of years ago: http://traffic.libsyn.com/omegataupodcast/omegatau-49-chipPr...
hackrmn
> These machines are roughly the size of double-decker buses. To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks. They are the world’s most complex objects. Each contains over one hundred thousand components, all of which have to be perfectly calibrated for the machine to produce light consistently at the right wavelength.As a software engineer by trade, the above parable communicates to me two very important things and little else by comparison: that the machines are ultimately fragile and nowhere near "optimised", since the complexity is by own admission substantial to put it mildly; the machine is not a commodity, exactly, one of the million pieces breaking subtly likely renders it inoperable; its cost is proportional to its complexity (read: astronomic); by mere fact it's a focal point of geopolitics only supports the rest of the argument it's a machine of current stone age much like siege engines were at some point the closely guarded secret win-or-lose multiplers of feudal culture.I mean it's certainly interesting to read about the complexity, but reducing the complexity and commoditising the whole thing is what's really going to be impressive I think :-)I am probably speaking out against the nerd in us, and none of what I said should detract from enjoying the article or the subject, it's just that I think complexity here is the giveaway of us not having conquered UVL exactly, not quite yet :-) Or maybe we lack the right materials which would allow us to reduce the machine or make it less complex or prone to calibration related errors.
dzonga
one thing not mentioned is how China is using the older tech DUV's to print advanced chipssince replicating EUVs is close to impossible.
t1234s
Isn't the ISS supposed to be the most complicated machine ever built by humans?
MrBuddyCasino
Rule of thumb: when something is being called "The World's Most Complex Machine", its either CERN's Large Hadron Collider or an ASML EUV machine.In this case, its the latter.
scaradim
Wow. I see the head of Charlie Chaplin inside the center machine unit. Do you see it?
ForHackernews
They might be the most complex mass-produced commercial machines but the Large Hadron Collider has a plausible claim to the title of "world's most complex machine" https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/103591-la...
mytailorisrich
It is unavoidable that, at some point, China will have its own matching or better machine because they obviously how incredibly strategically important it is.
jmyeet
Every part of this technology is astounding and you need a reasonable basis in physics to truly appreciate just how astounding it is. And the tolerances are so ridiculously precise, it boggles the mind.Even before you get to the lithography machine you need silicon. For a long time we've known how this is done. You create what's called a boule, which is where you create a cylinder of almost pure silicon by seeding molten silicon with a crystal and slowly forming it. You then cut the boule into the silicon discs we often see. That machining and polishing itself has to be super-precise.But I can remember when the tolerance for impurities was at 1 part per 300 million. I read recently that even 1 part per billion is now too impure. And that makes sense. The biggest chips are what? 80 billion transistors? I seem to remember NVidia makes chips in that range (or rather TSMC does for NVidia). At 1ppb that might make ruining your chip just too likely.So my point is that there's a whole industry to make super-pure silicon which itself took amazing advancements and without that this machine would be a lot less useful.Another part that amazes me is just how pervasive multiple layers on chips have become. I can remember when that was novel. The upper layers are made by cheaper machines with EUV reserved for a transistor "base layer" where all the interconnects really are.It's amazing just how many problems had to be solved to make this posible.
morpheos137
My understanding is step size has divergred from physical feature size for the past decade or so eg. 3 nm step (marketing) may actually be 42 nm physical. so in other words progress has slowed (diminishing returns to inverse scaling)
SideburnsOfDoom
On a tangent and out of curiosity: The image of "The electromagnetic spectrum" shows "London radio waves" on the far right (i.e. longest wavelengths).Is this the correct term? Why do these long radio waves have the name "London"?Unfortunately all that I get googling the term is a guide to local FM station frequencies.
scotty79
I'm pretty sure that's the most bizarre light source on the planet: https://youtu.be/B2482h_TNwg?t=929
moffkalast
If there's really such a bottleneck around ASML, why not design some extra chips for legacy processes that presumably already have well known design workflows?I mean we're not talking AMD FX and Core 2 Duo here, it's Raptor Lake and Zen 3, it's perfectly viable and still being sold in droves right now.
maxalbarello
and yet not even close to the complexity of the human brain
amelius
It looks complicated but I suspect that 90% of what I see in that picture is just a giant refrigerator.