Dutch chip machine manufacturer ASML is now more valuable than McDonald's, Unilever, Shell, Walt Disney or Nike. Martin van den Brink, chief technology officer responsible for innovations, is at the basis of this. His ambition? Making ASML succeed.
Source: De Ondernemer
The fact that Van den Brink can amply tick this ambition off his to-do list thirty years later is not at least due to ASML's astonishingly complex EUV machines. Thanks to the "saviors of Moore's Law," as MIT Technology Review recently called them, customers like TSMC, Samsung and Intel can now poke lines on their chips just 4 nanometers apart, or 4 millionths of a millimeter, a distance that has not yet been achieved. Once two dna molecules fit in between.
De Ondernemer and de Volkskrant published an interview with Martin van den Brink about his career, ideas, developments, failures and successes. Some quotes:
"In the current school system I would not have made it.”
“If you ask me what inspires me, it is what I thought at the time: if I could also contribute as much as all those Nobel Prize winners, that would be great. Because as a 35-year-old in such a laboratory (AT&T Bell Labs) I had the idea of: I'm sitting here with a big man, and I can't really compete with that.''
''I think that innovation in computer chips will continue for another twenty years. Chips will continue to get more and more powerfull over the next twenty years.’’
"Moore's Law is a law of economics not a law of physics.''
"In that respect, ASML really is a playground for engineers: nothing is insane, as long as it works.''
