I follow this with a tag line.
Why is the UK so shit at semiconductors and commercialisation?
Roll back the years two and a half decades I was an attendee at Semicon West Santa Clara and Semicon East nr Tokyo. At the former we spoke with ASML and at the latter I spoke with Nikon, Canon and started an approach to Gigaphton. I subsequently met representatives of Nikon in my hotel. I was not selling vacuum cleaner parts.
–
–
In principle at the time we were investigating a technology of truly global importance. There was a functional EUV prototype in the basement and the UK government showed no overt interest. I’ll speculate that in the USA potentially geo-politically important technology is followed to varying extents by, let’s call them the CIA, or some such. The investment in Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) technology since that time has run into tens of billions of dollars involving behemoths like Intel, Samsung and TSMC. Uniquely a single company has EUV lithography monopoly, ASML. But this company is part owned by USA and they have a veto on to whom ASML can sell kit. State of the art high end semiconductor production technology is geo-politically very important. It provides, perhaps, the current AI edge over China.
Nobody in college understood what was in the basement nor the implications thereof. They were more interested perhaps in their own career advancement and local departmental politics.
The internal cheese and wine, bring your own booze, shenanigans at the internecine death knoll of the last Tory government consumed the attention of those involved. The Napoleonic criticism of a nation of shopkeepers applies. And one could list “invented in UK” commercialised elsewhere. That list contains some commercial crown jewels pawned at well below value. The Basil Fawlty mentality pervades. It is a repeating pattern. When I have mentioned this failure pattern people have deemed me nasty and critical. I do not want to be all back slappy and chummy, so I am mean. “Don’t piss on my fire.” A squib is not a fire.
It is not unreasonable to suggest that various security services cast an eye over attendees at high technology conferences. They will obviously focus effort. It is not infeasible that an eye was kept on who met ASML and when, particularly on home turf. Thus there could be an iota of reality to my dream in that a note exists somewhere. I may be en passant on file.
One of the ideas that I had for developing an EUV source which I never got around to verbalising was the notion of a low gain, EUV laser. I figured that by using a low cavity pass number it might be possible to get some gain out of the laser produced plasma gain medium. That would provide a narrowing of optical band pass and some added directionality. I never expressed this to the start-up I was involved with. Because I thought that the CEO had thought that he had sucked us dry of ideas and we were no longer needed. That was his approach, use us and dump us. He was explicit in trying to find someone else who understood nozzle technology so that he could side line me. He was a gobshite and there was a massive mis-match in personalities.
One could say that it was another chapter in missed opportunity for UK plc. The truth was that without hundreds of millions of investment and support we were never going to get “there”. I for one was not the right person to try to lead such an endeavour.
From time to time I have had a patent download session at ESPACENET. Who knows if that is monitored?
The major difference about Americans is that they are not worried about being seen brash. If they want something or want to know, they ask. I do not have a problem with that.
All in all sat here this morning it is a bit weird to have the “surveillance” theme rear its head again.
In my mind the future looks pretty simple. I will continue to recover {hopefully}. Then I will be back out in the garden. I may even be able to use the sit-on mower. We have a room upstairs which needs DIY. In January I meet the surgeon for him to assess his handiwork and all being well we might pencil in a date for spring for the next hip hop hip op.
That is about it…the scope.
Dreamyoga 