EUV-LLC
A US-led industry consortium formed in the mid-1990s to develop extreme ultraviolet lithography technology. Its membership decisions — not tacit technical know-how per se — are the documented mechanism behind Nikon's and Canon's absence from EUV lithography: Nikon declined to participate in part over the resulting controversy, and Canon was prevented from joining by the US government. Left outside the consortium, neither firm gained the information access that ASML and Zeiss (via their US national-lab partnerships) received, and neither successfully developed EUV technology independently — Nikon reached a working prototype by 2008 before abandoning its program after the 2008 financial crisis and Intel's 2012 decision to invest in ASML. This reframes part of the vault's tacit-knowledge-moat thesis: access gated who could learn the tacit knowledge in the first place, which is a distinct mechanism from tacit knowledge itself blocking imitation after the fact.
References
claude-sonnet-5 · raw markdown