ASML, the “Dutch miracle” of semiconductors
[ad_1]
Parking lots, laboratories, tree-lined gardens, cafeterias (six in total, where you can eat cuisine from around the world): everything seems disproportionate in Veldhoven (Netherlands), in this industrial suburb of Eindhoven. This is where a Dutch company still unknown to the general public, Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography (ASML), has built a headquarters as big as an airport. In 1984, ASM – a small company of pioneers associated with the giant Philips, which regarded them with a little condescension and installed them in barracks at the foot of its HQ – had some 300 employees.
They are then apparently the only ones to believe in the future of their project of lithography machines for the manufacture of semiconductors and in the possibility of competing with American and Japanese players in the sector. They will often come close to bankruptcy, narrowly avoided thanks to support from the Dutch government, from Brussels. And Philips too, the company that really “made” Eindhoven, but which, entangled in its reorganization, perhaps did not understand that its baby could become a giant.
Less than forty years later, ASML employs very precisely 35,315 people, of whom 3,300 have been recruited in the last six months, says Monique Mols, in charge of communication. The company boasts on its website that it offers “infinite jobs”in the Netherlands and in its sixty locations on five continents.
“Appetite for technological innovation”
In the ultra-modern buildings of Veldhoven, engineers, executives, technicians and researchers of 119 nationalities ensure the stunning success of a company whose leaders enjoy saying that it is “the biggest high-tech company you’ve never heard of”. It supplies the largest semiconductor “founders”: the Taiwanese TSMC, the American Intel, the South Korean Samsung, the Chinese SMIC, etc.
To all these behemoths who could have been worried about their possible dependence on the Dutch and their unique know-how in the world, ASML has guaranteed unfailing support, tight prices and assistance based on one of the principles of its leaders. : “Proximity to the customer. » “I continue to admire the incredible appetite for technological innovation that is evident here”, adds Christophe Fouquet, member of the board of directors. This Frenchman worked in California and Israel before joining the company fifteen years ago, after discovering one of his machines in an American research center.
You have 74.48% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
[ad_2]
Source link
