Who Founded ASML Holding?

ASML was not founded by an individual with a vision. It was an underfunded joint venture between a conglomerate that wanted a project off its books and a smaller equipment company that wanted into lithography. Philips had developed a wafer stepper, the PAS 2000, out of the Silicon Repeater prototypes at Philips Research, but the project was small inside Philips, over budget and behind schedule, and the corporation was under severe financial pressure. Philips first pursued a partnership with the market leader Perkin Elmer, which wanted the leading role in sales and service; Philips would not grant access to Philips Research in a subordinate position and the talks dragged on until Perkin Elmer partnered with Censor instead. Philips then returned to ASM International, the company Arthur del Prado had built, which it had previously judged too junior, and the two agreed terms quickly. They announced the joint venture on September 5, 1983 and ASM Lithography commenced operations on April 1, 1984, initially in the Philips Strijp TQ building in Eindhoven, with Gjalt Smit brought in as managing director. Of the 50 engineers in the Philips wafer stepper group, 47 signed on, many of them reluctantly, since they were giving up jobs for life at Philips for a startup with no market access and a machine that had to be redesigned. Sheds were added as the company outgrew the building, and it moved into purpose-built premises in Veldhoven in 1985. The decisions that mattered came next: buying optics from Carl Zeiss from 1986 instead of building them, and later light sources from Cymer, which let ASML iterate faster than the vertically integrated Nikon and Canon. That systems integration model carried it through near-collapse in 1988, the PAS 5500 turnaround in 1991, TWINSCAN in 2001, immersion in 2003 and finally roughly two decades of EUV development. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Del Prado contribution to ASML was structural and financial rather than technical. ASM International supplied half the equity, the corporate structure and existing relationships in the semiconductor equipment industry, and adding lithography would have made ASM close to a one-stop shop for chipmaking equipment. Philips had initially dismissed ASM as an upstart and preferred Perkin Elmer; only when those talks collapsed did Philips Science & Industry technical director Georg de Kruyff resume discussions with del Prado in the spring of 1983, and the two sides agreed terms quickly. The investment proved heavier than ASM could sustain. By 1988, with ASML still short of customers and consuming cash, ASM International withdrew from the venture, and Philips funded the rescue that kept it alive. Del Prado remains recognized as a founding figure of the Dutch and European semiconductor equipment industry. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).