When an ASML Lithography Machine Goes Down

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[stevestarcke]

I was engineer on a line that cost a million dollars a day to be down. What a job that was. Talk about motivation to keep ahead of problems.

[rolux]

I once was a field engineer for ASML/Zeiss and regularly replaced lenses in those machines.
It surely was an interesting time, but it’s only for single people who are willing to travel on very short notice.

The good thing are luxury hotels and always a few days paid leave in the country.
I personally enjoyed South Korea the most, I was there stationed for 6 months and lived in an amazing hotel in the middle of Gangnam.

Now that I have a wife and a house I switched to a job that’s 100% remote.
It was a great time and the team at Zeiss was absolutely incredible and gave us the best training imaginable.

I will never forget my first time in a fab, deassembling that machine.
It felt so surreal!

[Indrid__Cold]

The ASML field engineer only makes between 90 and 110 grand a year and has to travel all the time, often on short notice (but at least the long flights are business class). The job is really tough on your body, with long hours of standing and moving heavy equipment. And you have to do it all in a clean room environment. But on the plus side, you get to work with the latest and greatest technology.

[topear]

I bet you when it goes down there's always that one guy that screams

[MyLinguine]

“Right so the computer that makes computers for fixing other computers is broken”

[icolate]

"A wiki of sad times" is such a fantastic quote.

[eduardofukay]

I used to work for Hewlett-Packard analytical instruments and one of our customers had to pay a penalty of 25 thousand dollars per day if the report was not filed.
We had a lot of pressure to get the machine back in line. I can only imagine the pressure the engineers at ASML suffer.

[masiv]

hope u are doing better, noticed you were down last video, dont know what happened (if anything) but just wanted to let you know my (and many many more people) appreciation for your superb content, subtle humor and excellent information! :p

[mxskelly]

I worked customer support for warehousing equipment (big sorters, conveyors, etc. for some of the biggest distributon centers you can think of...) and they sure hate downtime. Was on a 14hr long call with one place once. We had to get support engineers from another company on the line, and there were VP-type folks from the company experiencing the downtime on the call. The support engineer said he'd have to escalate the issue to the other engineers on his team, and when asked how long that'd take, said "they guarantee a response within 5 days". I could practically hear the customer's executives' heads almost explode.

[merlinemeresk]

A shout out to all the Field Application Engineers (FAEs) who knows their stuff and are able to minimise downtime of such a valuable piece of engineering Marvel.

[Legslarsen.]

I would guess 99% of people have no idea how complex and coordinated (between many companies and countries) making chips is. Thank you for making some of us a bit more knowledgeable. Literally, a bit.

[Stars-Mine]

0:27 when you learn an hour is 100 minutes long.

[S]

This hits home hard as a former field service engineer. I worked pretty much exclusively on a Swiss made digital cutter line and it was very much like this too, these machine were always the bottleneck and key equipment in all the businesses that had them, so when they went down it was most often a big deal for the customer, every minute was costing them and their own customer's money.

[johndoh]

When you make die using a lens that's slightly out of focus you get fuzzy logic.

[makerspace]

Although drilling an oil well may not sound particularly high tech, it is. A dynamically positioned drill ship may be drilling in water 1500 meters deep with a hole 1500 meters or more below the sea floor. All this relies on many things working properly. When somethings breaks, like the systems that keep the ship on station, all hell breaks loose. It's a million dollars or more per day to operate the ship, and the ship may be 200 miles from shore. The technicians on board are the best of the best. They have to be.

[thaconaway]

A Scanner down creates a lot of havoc on the track side as well. It's a rare opportunity to get some work done. Pretty crazy how much info you got in here. It'd be interesting to see what you could say about track dispensing purity and health

[EdwindeJong]

As a principal data engineer working on the flow of data coming from these machines, I can say I learned a thing or two from your presentation. Great video and keep them coming.

[raptordriver]

It ain't fun being a lead Engineer on support where your task is not complete unless it is 100% rectified, tested, commissioned and signed! Sure the money is great... but the pressure makes one feel life is getting shorter by the second. Glad I'm retired! LOL!

[charlier]

i work as a field service engineer and this video has a scary amount of information i wouldnt expect people to know

[vrclckd-zzpv]

Heh I did my undergrad dissertation in Comp Sci on simulating and correcting optical aberrations in human eyes. Made some nice wavefront visualisations based on Zernike polynomials.