Collaborative ecosystems and relentless innovation are the driving forces behind Europe’s greatest semiconductor success story. In this engaging DLD26 session, Annet Aris, Academic Director of the Corporate Governance Centre at INSEAD, sits down with Martin van den Brink, the longtime CTO of ASML, to unpack how Europe’s most valuable tech company came to be.
ASML doesn’t make chips, Aris reminds the audience, but the lithography machines that are necessary for semiconductor production — tools so advanced that they “are even more important than the chips themselves.”
Van den Brink explains that keeping Moore’s Law alive – the prediction that transistor density doubles every two years –requires massive, continuous leaps in lithography performance, with ASML’s machines pushing pixel rates from 5.8 per second in the 1970s to 45 terapixels today.
To achieve this exponential growth, ASML relies on a collaborative technology ecosystem rather than isolated, internal research labs. “In the semiconductor industry people are tough with each other”, Annet Aris says. “However at the end of the day there’s this enormous willingness and trust to cooperate, this willingness to share roadmaps.”
Companies have “more lose by not cooperating than to gain and try to control” the entire supply chain, van den Brink points out, because the market imposes strict time pressures for rapid innovation.
Watch the video to explore this session in detail.
