US startup Substrate announces chipmaking tool that it says will rival ASML
41 comments
·October 29, 2025klelatti
dskhatri
It is wild that the founders have very little experience in the space, and that their claims are based on sparse research. That said, the Substack article doesn't seem any more credible. Other than the name DC Fusion LLC, I missed any indications that the founder was working on a fusion startup. The article correctly identifies as an opinion piece but doesn't seem worthy of credible referencing.
seandoe
Wow, total scam. Sad.
cowthulhu
This doesn’t seem plausible. Leading edge lithography requires you to be at (or beyond) the cutting edge in many realms - even with a breakthrough in one realm, I don’t understand how a startup could expect to catch up to ASML across the board in a few years.
Their website is light on technical details and heavy on nationalistic fluff, which does not lend much confidence.
armada651
It is actually relatively easy to make a lithography machine that can etch features beyond what EUV can do. You simply use an electron scanning beam rather than photons.
It's what the industry uses to create the masks used in lithography machines, but it could just as easily be used to make the actual chip. The problem is that it doesn't scale, at all. A scanning process is way too slow to be useful in mass production.
Thus you should always be skeptical when someone says they've built a machine that beats ASML's machines, because that's actually the easy part. The hard part is scaling it up.
epicureanideal
Interesting! Makes me think of old 1990s X-Files episodes with chips under a microscope “smaller than we can produce”.
I wonder if the government makes small batches of bespoke chips that are super miniature based on non scalable processes, and how far back in time would they have been able to develop 1nm chips for example?
terminalshort
I don't know much about the technical details of lithography, but I do know that EUV lithography is very new tech that has been in production for less than 10 years and the current machines are basically rube goldberg devices. Given my lack of technical knowledge here, I can't say whether or nor this startup in particular is legit, but it does seem very much like the type of thing that could be disrupted by someone who comes up with a new and massively simplified design.
javier2
EUV machines were in development for nearly 20 years before they could reach actual chip production. The secret sauce was not getting it to work, but getting it to work stable enough such that it can be sustained millions of times per second. I am sure there were other huge challenges in bringing to market though, I am not an expert on this either.
terminalshort
Yeah, that's kind of my point. The design is so complicated that the hard part is actually getting it to work reliably in production. So it could just be that the current way is the only fundamental design that works and there is no radically simpler way to make EUV lithography work, but 99% of the time there is.
enraged_camel
Their website is that way because the goal is to attract the attention of the administration.
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chasil
Japan has also made some strides in this area, reported here a few months ago.
"Professor Shintake aligned two axis-symmetric mirrors in a straight line and used a total of only four mirrors instead of ten.
"Because highly absorbent EUV light weakens by 40% with each reflection, only about 1% of the energy from the light source reaches the wafer when bounced off ten mirrors while more than 10% does when only four mirrors are used."
https://asiatimes.com/2024/08/japan-on-edge-of-euv-lithograp...
Edit: "Substrate said that it has developed a version of lithography that uses X-ray light."
giva
"X-ray light" sound a bit like beer soda.
terminalshort
"X-ray" is just a word for light that falls within an arbitrary band of wavelength.
giantg2
I think you have it backwards - light is a term used for specific bands of the EM spectrum. Nobody is calling their FM radio waves light emissions. Unless this is a naming collison with the already established x-rays.
MyOutfitIsVague
Yes, but so are radio waves and gamma rays; it would still sound odd to hear somebody say "radio light" or "gamma light".
glimshe
They seem to have learned a lot from Theranos. I wonder if they will have the same fate.
caycep
stratechery had an interview w the founder, an interesting Brit but also a Thiel acolyte/investee, for better or worse. Ben also has tended a little too ...uncritical of tech boosterism these days, but I suppose the interview is good data
ksec
Somewhere along the line people have to realise most of the cost in chip design goes to software. So while it is nice to have some competition to ASML, it wouldn't change the cost equation as much as people expect.
And yes, ASML also have their own version using X-Ray in the pipeline.
Ekaros
When will production line be build and operational? When will the new chips ship? This or next quarter?
chrsw
If this is even legit, they're saying 3 years. So probably 5 years.
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RhysabOweyn
The issue with x-ray lithography has always been... the cost. Just the cost of making a mask for one of these systems makes it unusable in industry. Would be interested to hear what they did to get costs down.
jmyeet
You know who is going to develop cutting edge EUV+ lithography to rival ASML? It's not this startup (most likely). It's China.
Chipmaking is in a very weird geopolitical state and it has national security interests for most of the world. A Dutch company produces the machines to make chips and sells them to Taiwanese companies. The US still has the power to dictate who ASML can sell to and China is restricted.
This system has a number of flaws:
1. With this administration torching US influence at a never-seen-before rate, the US may no longer be able to dictate terms to ASML. At some point, it's all going to be too much for the EU;
2. Taiwan is disputed territory. This statement tends to make people mad but it's true. China claims it as China but, more importantly, the One China policy is official policy of the US [1] and the EU. Yet the US also has a defence pact with Taiwan. Not that it matters because China simply doesn't have the military capability to invade Taiwan and I honestly don't think they would anyway; and
3. The US has basically lost the ability to fab chips. Yes, Intel exists but they are a shadow of their former selves. The CHIPS Act tried to rectify this but even if this administration hadn't basically abandoned it, I don't think the US can see this one through regardless of administration. It's too long term. Any US company now that gets government aid just uses it on more executive compensation and share buybacks. Everything is now so financialized that any ability to produce anything is really just inertia from a bygone era.
China has the exact same national security concerns except it has a proven track record of investing in and delivering long-term projects.
[1]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-us-one-china-policy-and-w...
ChrisArchitect
Related:
Can Substrate disrupt ASML using particle acceleration?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/technology/can-a-start-up...
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732431)
See also:
Return to Silicon Valley
toomuchtodo
An investigation into Substrate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45767013 - November 2025
dbcooper
What chemistry would they use for the photoresist type resins?
jgon
Just a few days ago this company came up on HN as part of a substack post which pointed out the numerous warning signs that this company is likely a scam, so its crazy to see them given so much credulous reporting from mainstream media.
After persuasively demonstrating an inability to ship a fancy alarm clock even with 100MM in funding at his last startup, the founder has now decided to turn his attention to easily surmounting the decades of insane hard science and engineering that forms ASML's moat. Of course if this goes the way of the alarm clock startup there's also the fusion startup he's running that could form a fallback...
terminalshort
It's not crazy. It's routine. That's what the mainstream media does best. Remember just a couple months ago when the mainstream media bought the line that a standard SMS fraud operation was actually a terrorist thread against the UN?
The same guys who couldn’t develop a sleep tracker?
https://open.substack.com/pub/foxchapelresearch/p/i-think-su...