8-minute read - by Jorijn van Duijn, April 3, 2024
ASML was established as ASM Lithography on April 1, 1984. The joint venture from Philips and ASM International had a mandate: to commercialize a wafer stepper that had been developed at Philips, the PAS 2000.
The mythos around ASML’s founding paints a picture of a small, inquisitive startup relegated to a sticky shed and trying to break into a burgeoning semiconductor market. But how did we get to that point? Who were the early players in ASM Lithography, and why did they team up to form this new company?
This is the story of how a small project at Philips lingered at the edge of a rapidly evolving semiconductor ecosystem before finding its place, both in the industry and in Veldhoven, the Netherlands. The founding of the company was the start of something new and, at the same time, a continuation of decade-long development.
A division of labor
In the 1960s and 1970s, chipmakers built in-house the vast majority of their semiconductor value chain – all the steps needed to create a finished microchip. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the scale and complexity of semiconductor manufacturing technology grew fast. That development motivated a division of labor in the semiconductor value chain. A semiconductor equipment industry emerged to provide off-the-shelf cutting-edge solutions. With this readily available capability, it no longer made sense for chip manufacturers and users to develop their own chipmaking equipment.
