Veritasium
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2026
55:00 · 65M views · Dec 31, 2025
Veritasium explains how ASML's EUV lithography machines make the most advanced computer chips, covering the engineering of the light source, mirrors and the supply chain around them. It is a long-form explainer on the world's most complex commercial machine.
HN commenters recommend it as the accessible deep-dive on EUV lithography and why chip manufacturing is so hard.
11 comments from Hacker News
For those interested in ASML, and how much engineering goes into being able to make EUV lithography work reliably at scale for 3nm nodes (by hitting individual droplets of tin with highly accurate lasers and turning them into plasma!), I highly recommend this recent (Dec 2025) Veritasium video about them: this video For more: [LINK] (There's something incredible and downright "alchemical" about the fact that the reason our sand can "think" is because we use light to vaporize tin which then carves intricate glyphs into the sand!)
Veritasium has a nice video about it this video Obviously, there are a lot of reasons why. But it boils down to having the vision, the belief and the strength to follow through over many years. It's important to not confound vision with random Kool-Aid. Instead it's grounded in research. That research is itself grounded in a strong vision and belief — it got laughed by the entire physics community at the time: > 'people seemed unwilling to believe bending x-rays, and they tended to that we had actually made an image by regard the whole thing as a big fish story Now contrast this with the current academic reality — "publish or perish" and the reality of venture financing and corporate culture that "depends" (arguably in self-inflicted manner, that's not 100% the case) on quarterly repots. ASML is just a recent story, but if you look back, you'll see that most revolutions have a similar pattern of people crazy enough to deviate from the herd. The rest— the immense financial risk, the 5000 suppliers, etc. came as a result of having the ability to see through all the noise and the grit to to follow through when everyone calls you an idiot for not doing something "useful"
ASML's secret sauce is not that secret or uncopyable. The Chinese are already working on their clone of the Twinscan tools. Veritasium recently made a good video on the ASML machine design: this video The outcome may seem like magic, but the input is "simply" hard work and a big budget: billions of dollars and years of investment into tuning the parameters like droplet size, frequency, etc... The interviews make it clear that the real reason ASML's machines are (currently) unique is that few people had the vision, patience, and money to fund what seemed at the time impossible. The real magic was that ASML managed to hang on by a fingernail and get a successful result before the money ran out. Now that tin droplet EUV lasers have not only been demonstrated to be possible, but have become the essential component of a hugely profitable AI chip manufacturing industry, obtaining funding to develop a clone will be much easier.
The whole process was deep magic to me before I watched that video. It didn't seem less magical after I've watched it. More so, if anything. Asianometry[0] has a number of videos on EUV lithography that cover some of the mind-blowing advances in the years since. Veritasium[1] recently also made a video on the subject. [0] [LINK] [1] this video
Do you mean AMSL? There was a great video recently on the company + techniques used for cutting-edge lithography. this video