Europe's Biggest Semiconductor Supplier Hobbled By Fire, Sanctions

ASML, a Dutch company that produces equipment for the production of microchips, has been hobbled not only by a recent fire at its Berlin plant but also by strict US monitoring of its sales to China of such equipment and older technology.

Photo Insert: The factory manufactures components including wafer tables, clamps, reticle chucks, and mirror blocks for ASML's lithography products.

Writing for ZDnet, Charlie Osborne reported that the fire occurred at a production site in Berlin, Germany, on January 3, and was extinguished during the night. No injury was reported. The factory manufactures components including wafer tables, clamps, reticle chucks, and mirror blocks for ASML's lithography products.

After conducting an assessment of the damage, the tech giant has revealed that the fire occurred in one part of the factory's production area and the smoke impacted an adjacent building.

The fire caused disruption to manufacturing for several days, but ASML says that production has already been resumed. "The other buildings on the site have not been affected and are fully operational," ASML commented.

The company said the main disruption related to ASML's deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography systems, used to print the minute features of microchips to the nanometer. ASML hopes to "remediate" this interruption to production "in such a way that it will not affect our output and revenue plan for DUV."

However, the fire also impacted wafer clamp production. The wafer clamps are a component of ASML's extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machines, used to print foundational layers and build chip architecture.

ASML, the biggest European microchips producer and seller of chip manufacturing equipment, has been using laser technology to improve the capacity of its chips and derives 30% of its revenue from China sales, with production equipment priced at $100 million each.

With a ban imposed by the US on sales of equipment using US technology, ASML could not sell its advanced equipment to China. However, the company’s technology is so advanced that China can only catch up in 15 years.

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