Micron, ASML, Apple, Boise, Idaho, And All That Jazz -- December 30, 2024

Locator: 44572TECH.

Link here to The WSJ.  

At midnight tonight, if you have time for just one more article, this is it.

Note the byline. 

Quick: name the chip company located in Idaho.

I first paid attention to all of this after reading Chip War, c. 2022.

The article begins: 

BOISE, Idaho—Brienna Hall has the most valuable role that you’ll never see at the most vital company that you’ve never heard of. 

Until she began working at ASML last year, she didn’t know the first thing about the company. She also didn’t know what she would be doing as a customer-support engineer—a “fancy mechanic,” as she calls herself. 

And she had absolutely no idea that it would be essential to the global economy. 

When she reports for her shift at a chip plant, Hall slips into a bunny suit. She enters a room where the pristine air is 100 times cleaner than a hospital operating room’s. Then she makes her way over to an unfathomably complex machine. 

Her job is to know everything about it—so that she can fix it. 

“I thought I had the coolest job ever,” Hall says. “I didn’t process the fact that this job is necessary for our entire world to exist as it does.” 

The piece of equipment that the entire world has come to rely on—and she is specially trained to handle—is called an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine. 

It’s the machine that produces the most advanced microchips on the planet. It was built with scientific technologies that sound more like science fiction—breakthroughs so improbable that they were once dismissed as impossible. And it has transformed wafers of silicon into the engines of modern life. 

Even today, there are only a few hundred of these EUV machines in existence—and they are ludicrously expensive. The one that Hall maintains cost $170 million, while the latest models sell for roughly $370 million. 

But maybe the most remarkable thing about these invaluable machines is that they’re all made by the same company: ASML. 

ASML is the glue holding the chip business together. That’s because this one Dutch company is responsible for all of the EUV lithography systems that help make the chips in so many of your devices. Like your phone. And your computer. And your tablet. And your TV. Maybe even your car, too.

These machines have become indispensable. And they depend on the invisible work of Brienna Hall. 

She’s one of the engineers assigned to the fabrication plants—or fabs—where ASML customers manufacture their semiconductors. Hall is based here in Boise, the headquarters of Micron Technology, where I hopped into a bunny suit of my own and followed her inside the chip fab. 

Then I got a rare, behind-the-scenes peek at what might just be the most important machine ever made.

Brienna Hall?

Hall, 29, grew up in Seattle as a Girl Scout obsessed with tying the perfect knot. She was president of the Edmonds College rocketry club when she got her associate degree. At Washington State University, she majored in materials science and engineering—and transcribed notes for a professor writing a textbook on quantum mechanics. She loves planning camping trips even though she doesn’t actually like camping. In her spare time, she works with her hands, quilting and piecing together elaborate Ravensburger jigsaw puzzles.

All of which turned out to be excellent preparation for navigating a machine with more than 100,000 parts. 

“You’re always problem-solving,” said Alex Jordan, another ASML engineer. “How can I be more efficient? Where can I optimize this? And what if we tried that?” 

When the company recruits for customer-support positions, ASML looks for diligent, disciplined and detail-oriented engineers. Hall had the right kind of technical mind and temperament for the job. When one of her professors heard that a semiconductor company was hiring, Hall passed along her résumé and soon received emails from ASML asking her to apply.