Edit please note the comments in the linked post by SemiAnalysis below who have lots of reports that the tool is legit but who are skeptical. They have clearly progressed somewhat since the tracker project!
> Evidence so far is scarce, so we repeat these claims with some healthy skepticism. But we should also note, external contacts and 3rd party reports are all telling us the same story: the litho tool is legit. Note we have worked with Substrate since as far back as 2022, but the technical analysis here was by team members who did not have access to that NDA information.
> Naysayers will point out a million reasons why this is improbable, difficult, etc. - and they are mostly correct.
> We're hopeful for success but skeptical given how many questions there are.
Money laundering. Or more of the usual, in that the rich have so much money that they've never had to invest intelligently. Just scream for endless growth and throw darts at the dart board.
That way when you hit the bullseye, you'll make da hueg profitz while all the employees of the company can't afford to buy houses.
It is wild that the founders have very little experience in the space, and that their claims are based on sparse research. That said, the Substack article doesn't seem any more credible. Other than the name DC Fusion LLC, I missed any indications that the founder was working on a fusion startup. The article correctly identifies as an opinion piece but doesn't seem worthy of credible referencing.
I don’t have the expertise to say whether I agree with the conclusions of the post but the experience and track records of the founders are surely relevant? Happy to be shown evidence that these sections of the post are wrong.
This news article is a week old, meaning this post was clearly upvote-brigaded by reputation management software to try to bury the post about Substrate being a fraud.
This doesn’t seem plausible. Leading edge lithography requires you to be at (or beyond) the cutting edge in many realms - even with a breakthrough in one realm, I don’t understand how a startup could expect to catch up to ASML across the board in a few years.
Their website is light on technical details and heavy on nationalistic fluff, which does not lend much confidence.
It is actually relatively easy to make a lithography machine that can etch features beyond what EUV can do. You simply use an electron scanning beam rather than photons.
It's what the industry uses to create the masks used in lithography machines, but it could just as easily be used to make the actual chip. The problem is that it doesn't scale, at all. A scanning process is way too slow to be useful in mass production.
Thus you should always be skeptical when someone says they've built a machine that beats ASML's machines, because that's actually the easy part. The hard part is scaling it up.
Interesting! Makes me think of old 1990s X-Files episodes with chips under a microscope “smaller than we can produce”.
I wonder if the government makes small batches of bespoke chips that are super miniature based on non scalable processes, and how far back in time would they have been able to develop 1nm chips for example?
The node sizes have become more of marketing term, so it's more useful to look at the half-pitch resolution when doing comparisons. In 2007 researchers demonstrated they could reach a 15nm half-pitch using an electron scanning beam. [1] Whereas ASML reliably achieved this resolution using EUV around 2017.
Thus in the early 2000s you would be about 10 years ahead using electron scanning beam lithography. However that assumes you have all the tooling and transistor designs to actually create a working chip at that resolution. Showing you can etch a feature at nanometer scale is one thing, actually using it to create a working chip is a whole other ball game.
Funnily enough Asianometry just did a video on tsmcs new masks and how the machines involved WERE particularly hard to develop, "Multi-Beam Mask Writer" that uses hundreds of thousands of electron beams (after splitting) to accomplish its task.
> investments from the Central Intelligence Agency-backed nonprofit firm In-Q-Tel
The CIA has stolen trade secrets in the past and the only thing that stopped them in recent history is their own policies. The CIA has a new director that has been violating international law more openly than ever.
I don't know much about the technical details of lithography, but I do know that EUV lithography is very new tech that has been in production for less than 10 years and the current machines are basically rube goldberg devices. Given my lack of technical knowledge here, I can't say whether or nor this startup in particular is legit, but it does seem very much like the type of thing that could be disrupted by someone who comes up with a new and massively simplified design.
EUV machines were in development for nearly 20 years before they could reach actual chip production.
The secret sauce was not getting it to work, but getting it to work stable enough such that it can be sustained millions of times per second. I am sure there were other huge challenges in bringing to market though, I am not an expert on this either.
Yeah, that's kind of my point. The design is so complicated that the hard part is actually getting it to work reliably in production. So it could just be that the current way is the only fundamental design that works and there is no radically simpler way to make EUV lithography work, but 99% of the time there is.
Exactly. And it should. The "CHIPS Act" should be thought of as a perpetual blank cheque to whoever can build the components necessary to build war machines completely with North American components (primarily USA components but Canada will have some impact)
Japan has also made some strides in this area, reported here a few months ago.
"Professor Shintake aligned two axis-symmetric mirrors in a straight line and used a total of only four mirrors instead of ten.
"Because highly absorbent EUV light weakens by 40% with each reflection, only about 1% of the energy from the light source reaches the wafer when bounced off ten mirrors while more than 10% does when only four mirrors are used."
I think you have it backwards - light is a term used for specific bands of the EM spectrum. Nobody is calling their FM radio waves light emissions. Unless this is a naming collison with the already established x-rays.
Somewhere along the line people have to realise most of the cost in chip design goes to software. So while it is nice to have some competition to ASML, it wouldn't change the cost equation as much as people expect.
And yes, ASML also have their own version using X-Ray in the pipeline.
You mean the cost of EDA software directly (paying Synopsys/Cadence for the software used to design, verify, and synthesize your own chips)? Or the actual R&D cost to design the chip itself? Or paying for prepackaged IP blocks (major ones like CPU cores, or lesser ones like I/O)?
stratechery had an interview w the founder, an interesting Brit but also a Thiel acolyte/investee, for better or worse. Ben also has tended a little too ...uncritical of tech boosterism these days, but I suppose the interview is good data
The issue with x-ray lithography has always been... the cost. Just the cost of making a mask for one of these systems makes it unusable in industry. Would be interested to hear what they did to get costs down.
From a VC perspective, it does make sense to invest in EUV equipment tech. Being successful immediately makes the company one of the most important in the world (and opens up a $15B+ market).
Just a few days ago this company came up on HN as part of a substack post which pointed out the numerous warning signs that this company is likely a scam, so its crazy to see them given so much credulous reporting from mainstream media.
After persuasively demonstrating an inability to ship a fancy alarm clock even with 100MM in funding at his last startup, the founder has now decided to turn his attention to easily surmounting the decades of insane hard science and engineering that forms ASML's moat. Of course if this goes the way of the alarm clock startup there's also the fusion startup he's running that could form a fallback...
It's not crazy. It's routine. That's what the mainstream media does best. Remember just a couple months ago when the mainstream media bought the line that a standard SMS fraud operation was actually a terrorist thread against the UN?
You know who is going to develop cutting edge EUV+ lithography to rival ASML? It's not this startup (most likely). It's China.
Chipmaking is in a very weird geopolitical state and it has national security interests for most of the world. A Dutch company produces the machines to make chips and sells them to Taiwanese companies. The US still has the power to dictate who ASML can sell to and China is restricted.
This system has a number of flaws:
1. With this administration torching US influence at a never-seen-before rate, the US may no longer be able to dictate terms to ASML. At some point, it's all going to be too much for the EU;
2. Taiwan is disputed territory. This statement tends to make people mad but it's true. China claims it as China but, more importantly, the One China policy is official policy of the US [1] and the EU. Yet the US also has a defence pact with Taiwan. Not that it matters because China simply doesn't have the military capability to invade Taiwan and I honestly don't think they would anyway; and
3. The US has basically lost the ability to fab chips. Yes, Intel exists but they are a shadow of their former selves. The CHIPS Act tried to rectify this but even if this administration hadn't basically abandoned it, I don't think the US can see this one through regardless of administration. It's too long term. Any US company now that gets government aid just uses it on more executive compensation and share buybacks. Everything is now so financialized that any ability to produce anything is really just inertia from a bygone era.
China has the exact same national security concerns except it has a proven track record of investing in and delivering long-term projects.
Chip making is one of the unique tech which is at the farthest end of humanity's engineering capabilities. Not just ASML, its entire supply chain is full of extremely precise components which 1 or 2 companies have mastered. e.g. the mirrors used are so precise that if scaled to size of earth tallest mountain will be 1cm high. Sure China will make it one day and maybe will beat rest of the world, it is not given to be in near future.
"Samsung is a major buyer of Japanese chemical companies producing fluorine polyimide used to make flexible OLED displays, as well as resist and etching gas needed in the semiconductor fabrication process."
Samsung's CEO went to Japan to try and secure Japan's chemicals back in 2019 during the bad blood between South Korea and Japan.
China will have to take on the entire supply chain from chemicals, machines and talents if they want to avoid a chokehold. That's a very tall order.
> If you show revenue, people will ask 'HOW MUCH?' and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100xer, the 1000xer is suddenly the 2x dog. But if you have NO revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue! You're a potential pure play... It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And who is worth the most? Companies that lose money!
The same guys who couldn’t develop a sleep tracker?
https://open.substack.com/pub/foxchapelresearch/p/i-think-su...
Edit please note the comments in the linked post by SemiAnalysis below who have lots of reports that the tool is legit but who are skeptical. They have clearly progressed somewhat since the tracker project!
For balance here is SemiAnalysis - who really know what they are talking about - on Substrate
https://open.substack.com/pub/semianalysis/p/how-to-kill-2-m...
Good writeup. Note that they say:
> Evidence so far is scarce, so we repeat these claims with some healthy skepticism. But we should also note, external contacts and 3rd party reports are all telling us the same story: the litho tool is legit. Note we have worked with Substrate since as far back as 2022, but the technical analysis here was by team members who did not have access to that NDA information.
> Naysayers will point out a million reasons why this is improbable, difficult, etc. - and they are mostly correct.
> We're hopeful for success but skeptical given how many questions there are.
Thank you. I’ve added a brief summary of this in the top comment.
Thanks for this. I now know anyone supporting these guys are either dumb, getting scammed or part of the scam.
This is 100% a scam or vaporware. What a waste of investment dollars.
Money laundering. Or more of the usual, in that the rich have so much money that they've never had to invest intelligently. Just scream for endless growth and throw darts at the dart board.
That way when you hit the bullseye, you'll make da hueg profitz while all the employees of the company can't afford to buy houses.
It is wild that the founders have very little experience in the space, and that their claims are based on sparse research. That said, the Substack article doesn't seem any more credible. Other than the name DC Fusion LLC, I missed any indications that the founder was working on a fusion startup. The article correctly identifies as an opinion piece but doesn't seem worthy of credible referencing.
I don’t have the expertise to say whether I agree with the conclusions of the post but the experience and track records of the founders are surely relevant? Happy to be shown evidence that these sections of the post are wrong.
Wow, total scam. Sad.
This news article is a week old, meaning this post was clearly upvote-brigaded by reputation management software to try to bury the post about Substrate being a fraud.
Already in bed with Peter Thiel, and by his twitter, ingratiating himself with Vance, Trump and Lutnick.
Breathless branding with the word "America" in every other sentence.
How long before the Trump admin decides to throw federal funds into the grift so these "investors" get paid?
They're probably hoping to grab as much investor money as they can before getting a presidential pardon, like that Nikola guy.
They are called 'freedom chips'
This doesn’t seem plausible. Leading edge lithography requires you to be at (or beyond) the cutting edge in many realms - even with a breakthrough in one realm, I don’t understand how a startup could expect to catch up to ASML across the board in a few years.
Their website is light on technical details and heavy on nationalistic fluff, which does not lend much confidence.
It is actually relatively easy to make a lithography machine that can etch features beyond what EUV can do. You simply use an electron scanning beam rather than photons.
It's what the industry uses to create the masks used in lithography machines, but it could just as easily be used to make the actual chip. The problem is that it doesn't scale, at all. A scanning process is way too slow to be useful in mass production.
Thus you should always be skeptical when someone says they've built a machine that beats ASML's machines, because that's actually the easy part. The hard part is scaling it up.
At best they will manufacture masks. But that was already the "easy" part right?
Interesting! Makes me think of old 1990s X-Files episodes with chips under a microscope “smaller than we can produce”.
I wonder if the government makes small batches of bespoke chips that are super miniature based on non scalable processes, and how far back in time would they have been able to develop 1nm chips for example?
The TV series could have been true! Even in the 1980s we could push individual atoms around, albeit very very slowly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope#...)
The node sizes have become more of marketing term, so it's more useful to look at the half-pitch resolution when doing comparisons. In 2007 researchers demonstrated they could reach a 15nm half-pitch using an electron scanning beam. [1] Whereas ASML reliably achieved this resolution using EUV around 2017.
Thus in the early 2000s you would be about 10 years ahead using electron scanning beam lithography. However that assumes you have all the tooling and transistor designs to actually create a working chip at that resolution. Showing you can etch a feature at nanometer scale is one thing, actually using it to create a working chip is a whole other ball game.
[1] https://spie.org/news/0599-double-exposure-makes-dense-high-...
Patterning is just one of many issues.
Lmao no it's not "relatively easy"
Funnily enough Asianometry just did a video on tsmcs new masks and how the machines involved WERE particularly hard to develop, "Multi-Beam Mask Writer" that uses hundreds of thousands of electron beams (after splitting) to accomplish its task.
Nothing about that industry is easy.
> investments from the Central Intelligence Agency-backed nonprofit firm In-Q-Tel
The CIA has stolen trade secrets in the past and the only thing that stopped them in recent history is their own policies. The CIA has a new director that has been violating international law more openly than ever.
I don't know much about the technical details of lithography, but I do know that EUV lithography is very new tech that has been in production for less than 10 years and the current machines are basically rube goldberg devices. Given my lack of technical knowledge here, I can't say whether or nor this startup in particular is legit, but it does seem very much like the type of thing that could be disrupted by someone who comes up with a new and massively simplified design.
EUV machines were in development for nearly 20 years before they could reach actual chip production. The secret sauce was not getting it to work, but getting it to work stable enough such that it can be sustained millions of times per second. I am sure there were other huge challenges in bringing to market though, I am not an expert on this either.
Yeah, that's kind of my point. The design is so complicated that the hard part is actually getting it to work reliably in production. So it could just be that the current way is the only fundamental design that works and there is no radically simpler way to make EUV lithography work, but 99% of the time there is.
Their website is that way because the goal is to attract the attention of the administration.
Exactly. And it should. The "CHIPS Act" should be thought of as a perpetual blank cheque to whoever can build the components necessary to build war machines completely with North American components (primarily USA components but Canada will have some impact)
But its a scam.
Japan has also made some strides in this area, reported here a few months ago.
"Professor Shintake aligned two axis-symmetric mirrors in a straight line and used a total of only four mirrors instead of ten.
"Because highly absorbent EUV light weakens by 40% with each reflection, only about 1% of the energy from the light source reaches the wafer when bounced off ten mirrors while more than 10% does when only four mirrors are used."
https://asiatimes.com/2024/08/japan-on-edge-of-euv-lithograp...
Edit: "Substrate said that it has developed a version of lithography that uses X-ray light."
IBM also worked on X-ray lithography
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5389640
"X-ray light" sound a bit like beer soda.
"X-ray" is just a word for light that falls within an arbitrary band of wavelength.
Yes, but so are radio waves and gamma rays; it would still sound odd to hear somebody say "radio light" or "gamma light".
I think you have it backwards - light is a term used for specific bands of the EM spectrum. Nobody is calling their FM radio waves light emissions. Unless this is a naming collison with the already established x-rays.
Everybody says "ultraviolet light" even though it's invisible.
Not all light is visible.
Right, hence "visible light". So I don't see the problem with saying x-ray light either.
It's an established term in physics. E.g., https://lightsources.org/
They seem to have learned a lot from Theranos. I wonder if they will have the same fate.
Somewhere along the line people have to realise most of the cost in chip design goes to software. So while it is nice to have some competition to ASML, it wouldn't change the cost equation as much as people expect.
And yes, ASML also have their own version using X-Ray in the pipeline.
You mean the cost of EDA software directly (paying Synopsys/Cadence for the software used to design, verify, and synthesize your own chips)? Or the actual R&D cost to design the chip itself? Or paying for prepackaged IP blocks (major ones like CPU cores, or lesser ones like I/O)?
this has 0 to do with price and if they win the fact that the US will choose its local competitor over them wouldnt be because of price
> local competitor
Meh, ASML could be ordered to move to the US and they would comply.
It's not necessary, cf. Nexperia.
I should hope that they wouldn't. In fact I presume they wouldn't. Without ASML or TSMC, some of the most valuable American companies would be fucked.
stratechery had an interview w the founder, an interesting Brit but also a Thiel acolyte/investee, for better or worse. Ben also has tended a little too ...uncritical of tech boosterism these days, but I suppose the interview is good data
The issue with x-ray lithography has always been... the cost. Just the cost of making a mask for one of these systems makes it unusable in industry. Would be interested to hear what they did to get costs down.
Here are two statements from some of the investors: https://www.longjourney.vc/news/cyans-substrate-tattoo
https://www.generalcatalyst.com/stories/our-investment-in-su...
From a VC perspective, it does make sense to invest in EUV equipment tech. Being successful immediately makes the company one of the most important in the world (and opens up a $15B+ market).
Regular viewers of Asianometry channel will probably know that this is unlikely
Just a few days ago this company came up on HN as part of a substack post which pointed out the numerous warning signs that this company is likely a scam, so its crazy to see them given so much credulous reporting from mainstream media.
After persuasively demonstrating an inability to ship a fancy alarm clock even with 100MM in funding at his last startup, the founder has now decided to turn his attention to easily surmounting the decades of insane hard science and engineering that forms ASML's moat. Of course if this goes the way of the alarm clock startup there's also the fusion startup he's running that could form a fallback...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45767013
> the decades of insane hard science and engineering
Don’t forget the Century of engineering knowledge at Zeiss who deliver the mirrors in the ASML machines. See below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45745536#45813952
It's not crazy. It's routine. That's what the mainstream media does best. Remember just a couple months ago when the mainstream media bought the line that a standard SMS fraud operation was actually a terrorist thread against the UN?
What chemistry would they use for the photoresist type resins?
Samsung has access to the same ASML tools but has much lower yield than TSMC. Chip making is hard.
Related:
Can Substrate disrupt ASML using particle acceleration?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/technology/can-a-start-up...
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732431)
See also:
Return to Silicon Valley
https://substrate.com/our-purpose
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45741489)
An investigation into Substrate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45767013 - November 2025
When will production line be build and operational? When will the new chips ship? This or next quarter?
If this is even legit, they're saying 3 years. So probably 5 years.
You know who is going to develop cutting edge EUV+ lithography to rival ASML? It's not this startup (most likely). It's China.
Chipmaking is in a very weird geopolitical state and it has national security interests for most of the world. A Dutch company produces the machines to make chips and sells them to Taiwanese companies. The US still has the power to dictate who ASML can sell to and China is restricted.
This system has a number of flaws:
1. With this administration torching US influence at a never-seen-before rate, the US may no longer be able to dictate terms to ASML. At some point, it's all going to be too much for the EU;
2. Taiwan is disputed territory. This statement tends to make people mad but it's true. China claims it as China but, more importantly, the One China policy is official policy of the US [1] and the EU. Yet the US also has a defence pact with Taiwan. Not that it matters because China simply doesn't have the military capability to invade Taiwan and I honestly don't think they would anyway; and
3. The US has basically lost the ability to fab chips. Yes, Intel exists but they are a shadow of their former selves. The CHIPS Act tried to rectify this but even if this administration hadn't basically abandoned it, I don't think the US can see this one through regardless of administration. It's too long term. Any US company now that gets government aid just uses it on more executive compensation and share buybacks. Everything is now so financialized that any ability to produce anything is really just inertia from a bygone era.
China has the exact same national security concerns except it has a proven track record of investing in and delivering long-term projects.
[1]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-us-one-china-policy-and-w...
Chip making is one of the unique tech which is at the farthest end of humanity's engineering capabilities. Not just ASML, its entire supply chain is full of extremely precise components which 1 or 2 companies have mastered. e.g. the mirrors used are so precise that if scaled to size of earth tallest mountain will be 1cm high. Sure China will make it one day and maybe will beat rest of the world, it is not given to be in near future.
https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20190709009300320
"Samsung is a major buyer of Japanese chemical companies producing fluorine polyimide used to make flexible OLED displays, as well as resist and etching gas needed in the semiconductor fabrication process."
Samsung's CEO went to Japan to try and secure Japan's chemicals back in 2019 during the bad blood between South Korea and Japan.
China will have to take on the entire supply chain from chemicals, machines and talents if they want to avoid a chokehold. That's a very tall order.
>"at a high rate of throughput"
will "high rate" or "high throughput" do or it is just me?
> US startup Substrate announces chipmaking tool that it says will rival ASML
Typical investor bullshitting. They have some pictures. No process. Nothing
> If you show revenue, people will ask 'HOW MUCH?' and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100xer, the 1000xer is suddenly the 2x dog. But if you have NO revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue! You're a potential pure play... It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And who is worth the most? Companies that lose money!
I'll believe it when they ship.
More Silicon Valley fraud that will likely be rewarded by the current administration.
So if I have no values at all VCs will give me millions? That must be what I’m doing wrong.
I can announce a warp drive and a picometer chip process, just give a dollar, pretty please.
Asking for a dollar is going to land you in jail. You need to ask for a billion dollars.
One. Billion. Dollars. I guess?