Always Be Curious in 2024: Your Top 10 articles and a bunch of Sander's faves
Let's take a look at the stories that you read and engaged with the most. I've also listed some of my own favorites. Thanks for an awesome 2024!
Every week, I put a lot of work into ABC.✨ If you love this newsletter and get value out of it, please consider supporting it with a paid subscription 🙏
Time to wrap up the year with a bit of number crunching! Here are your Top 10 most-read stories over this year’s 49 editions of ABC. It’s a nice list that makes me proud, my dear Curious Clan! ❤️ You learned a ton about new trends in the chip industry, seen state-of-the-art robotics, and got wowed with amazing applications of AI. 🔥🤓
I’ve also added some of my personal faves from throughout the year. At the top of my list are 2 translated transcriptions of Dutch podcasts that ASML’s former CTO Martin van den Brink did with radio station BNR. It’s all about his 40-year career in the chip industry, steering ASML from unlikely start-up to global tech powerhouse. These pieces are chockful of interesting insights about life, business and tech.
Thank you for reading, sharing and supporting ABC! Stay curious in 2025. I’ll keep delivering the stories that will grow your awareness and understanding of the chip industry and its impact. See you in the new year!
Have a good week, stay safe and sound,
🏆 The 10 most read articles of 2024 👨💻
🥇 Inside the miracle of modern chip manufacturing (Financial Times)🔐
From ABC #204. Absolute MUST-READ for anyone interested in the basics of the chip industry. This is great piece of journalism. ❤️
🥈 This film wasn’t filmed: ASML harnesses generative Artificial Intelligence to make its latest brand film (ASML)
From ABC #200. ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’ was made possible by the very computing power that ASML’s lithography systems help enable.
🥉 How to build a $20 billion semiconductor fab (Construction Physics)
From ABC #214. Fellow Substacker Brian Potter of
dives into the manufacturing process of semiconductors and explains what a fab is, does, and how it’s made. Great stuf!
4️⃣ How ASML took over the chipmaking chessboard (MIT Technology Review)
From ABC #209. MIT Technology Review sat down with outgoing CTO Martin van den Brink to talk about the company’s rise to dominance and the life and death of Moore’s Law.
5️⃣ 5 things you should know about High NA in EUV (ASML)
From ABC #199. My colleague Christine Middleton brings you the what, why and how behind the latest extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems. ✍️
6️⃣ Figure 01 - OpenAI Speech-To-Speech Reasoning (Figure)
From ABC #206. A pretty amazing robot caught your eye this year!
7️⃣ TSMC outlines path to EUV success: more tools, more wafers, and best pellicles in industry (Anandtech)
From ABC #215. As part of the company's European Technology Symposium this week, TSMC went into a bit more detail on their EUV usage history, and their progress on further integrating EUV into future process nodes.
8️⃣ The Excel superstars throw down in Vegas (The Verge)
From ABC #219. Microsoft Excel is arguably the world’s most important piece of business software. Can it also be a sport? YES.
9️⃣ Nikon announces development of a digital lithography system with 1.0 micron resolution (Nikon)
From ABC #233. Ooooh, so this one peeked your interest hm? 👀 Nikon is developing a ‘digital’ (= maskless) lithography system with resolution of one micron and high productivity for advanced semiconductor packaging applications. This product is scheduled to be released in Nikon's fiscal year 2026.
🔟 Intel vs. Samsung vs. TSMC (Semiconductor Engineering)
From ABC #223. Foundry competition heats up in three dimensions and with novel technologies as planar scaling benefits diminish.
✨ Sander’s favorites 🤓
🍿 How are microchips made? (Branch Education)
❤️ Kudos to Branch Education for taking you on a 30-minute animated tour of a microchip fabrication plant or fab and explaining the dozens of steps used to make a microchip. A total of four different animators worked on this video for 5 months, for a total of 1300 hours of research, modeling, script writing, animating, editing, animating again, rendering, and then more editing.
🍿 What’s next for ASML? (Asianometry)
If ASML's High NA EUV is "The Beast" of lithography, then surely Jon Y of Asianometry must be "The Beast" of content. 😎 My colleague Marc and I had the privilege to meet this enigmatic storyteller in Veldhoven, where we showed him around our campus on his quest to find out what's next for ASML. The result is this video essay, delving into the company's origins and defining culture, its fast growth, future expansion plans, and its tech roadmap.
🚀 Thermonuclear blasts and new species: inside Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars (The New York Times)🎁
SpaceX employees are working on plans for a Martian city, including dome habitats, spacesuits and researching whether humans can procreate off Earth. Mr. Musk has volunteered his sperm.
🔥 CERN’s supercollider plan: $17-billion ‘Higgs factory’ would dwarf LHC (Nature)
From ABC #201. Big science, bigger science, biggest science!? A feasibility study on the Future Circular Collider identifies where and how the machine could be built — but its construction is far from a done deal.
👶🏻 Happy birthday, baby! What the future holds for those born today (MIT Technology Review)
An intelligent digital agent could be a companion for life—and other predictions for the next 125 years.
🔮 The year is 2149 and … (MIT Technology Review) 🔐
Novelist Sean Michaels envisions what life will look like 125 years from now.
🍿 The story behind Pixar’s RenderMan CGI software (IEEE Spectrum)
This rendering software revolutionized the animation industry. You first saw it at work in Toy Story.
🤯 1980s generative AI? Demo "Magic Harp" for Commodore Amiga (Break Into Chat)
From ABC #197. Blogger Josh Renaud recovered two unpublished Commodore Amiga demo programs from the 80s that were some of the earliest examples of generative AI. The unreleased demos “Magic Harp” and “Computer Composer” were built by programmer-cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen in 1986 and could generate new music by recombining patterns extracted from existing music.
📚 The old-fashioned library at the heart of the AI boom (The New York Times)
What can I say…I love paper books! And inside the OpenAI headquarters, there is a homage to the written word: a library.
Always Be Curious is the personal newsletter of Sander Hofman, Media Manager at ASML. Opinions expressed in this curated newsletter are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.