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EUV lithography machines are borderline science fiction. I mean if you look at all the steps included it's mind boggling. Shooting tiny droplets of tin with two lasers at a speed of 50k times/second, harvesting uv light through atomic precision mirrors, moving wafers with nanometer precision and all that in perfect vacuum. You watch the video demos and seems like you're watching a sf movie.
It just seems tremendously inefficient. Power in vs useful power out is huge. What's stopping them from "just" making a uv laser? I'm guessing tin is the only material with the right size of band gap to emit at the required frequency.
Nonpaywalled link: https://archive.is/flU0v
Semiconductors with direct band gaps like gallium nitride can be used to make light emitting diodes (both incoherent light and lasers). Gallium nitride emits light around 405 nanometers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium_nitride
The light wavelength is proportional to the band gap. GaN has a 3.4 electron volt band gap.
To get a 13.5 nanometer emission, you'd need a direct band gap material in excess of 90 electron volts:
https://www.kmlabs.com/en/wavelength-to-photon-energy-calcul...
No such materials exist.
The emission from tin in EUV light sources is actually from thermal (blackbody) radiation. The infrared lasers heat tin vapor to extremely high temperatures where it shines into the extreme ultraviolet. It's inherently wasteful but this extreme ultraviolet range is much harder to access than visible light or near ultraviolet.
It's really weird that particle accelerators or just some sort of X-ray tubes are apparently even more bothersome than precisely exploding freefalling drops of liquid tin with heat rays.
that's just laser with mirror machine that beep really fast
Oh man oh man, can we get some more pictures of crazy machines? Here's another https://www.extremetech.com/computing/report-intel-bought-al...
A recent CCC talk covered the current state of EUV lithography (really well): https://youtu.be/NdppYYfQJgg?t=1393 This timecode has rendering of the ASML machine in action. (edit: the same one madspindel posted, oops! The rest of the talk def worth a watch)
Brilliant talk thanks for suggesting.
And even that official video is massively underplaying how fast these steppers (and in turn: all the mechanics around the mirrors) work. Look at this video at ~44:20 to get a better feeling
The platen is accelerating at 32g, speeds over 100kph, with a precision of FOUR SILCON ATOMS. That is absolutely astounding. What a beautiful machine
Is it the processing of the image, or is the shine of the machine really a warm silvery colour?
> For NIL to become a mainstream chipmaking technology, it must overcome several challenges. Defects are a big concern—tiny particles or imperfections on the mould can create repeating flaws across entire wafers. Alignment is another hurdle. Since chips are built in layers, the circuit patterns of every layer must line up precisely.
The one major advantage NIL has over optical techniques is that it does not require multiple patterning to address edge cases:
> To prevent China from building whizzy AI chips, America has barred ASML from selling its most advanced gear to Chinese chipmakers.
Isn't that the craziest thing? America can prevent the Netherlands selling goods to China. Isolationist America? What did they threaten the Netherlands with, I wonder?
> America can prevent the Netherlands selling goods to China
EUV lithography was jointly developed by the U.S. and the Netherlands [1][2][3].
[1] https://www.eetimes.com/u-s-gives-ok-to-asml-on-euv-effort/
[2] https://www.llnl.gov/article/27641/euvl-partnership-makes-it...
[3] https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories/2022/making-euv-lab-to-...
[2] is kinda funny:
"Processors built using EUV technology are expected to reach speeds of up to 10 GHz in 2005-2006."
To be fair, ISTR that around 2005 there was a group running a pentium 4 at 9.something GHz by liquid nitrogen cooling it.
It’s part of the license agreement ASML signed to commercialize ultra violet lithography since the idea originated in Lawrence Livermore Labs research.
If you do business in the US as ASML does then it's a good idea to comply with sanctions. Otherwise they'll sanction you too.
Would be interesting to see how that would work out for ASML specifically since US obviously wants their products. But I think it would be catastrophic for both sides if the US sanctioned ASML. Less catastrophic for ASML to comply.
The US has successfully fined many EU companies for OFAC violations, for example. This is especially ridiculous because the EU actually required European companies NOT to comply with US sanctions on Iran.
(Note that I don't think this specific restriction on selling fab equipment to comes comes from OFAC)
Sure but even without this if the US told the Netherlands to jump they would. The US have a huge influence over the Netherlands economically, politically, and militarily (their airforce is a US hardware showroom, basically, which also highlights the political influence).
Just the fact that some tech comes for Lawrence Livermore Labs shows that relations are "tight".
Yes because ASML use American technology, same like You cant produce disney character without breaking the law despite you can perfectly recreated it
I mean something changed recently in America
> What did they threaten the Netherlands with, I wonder?
Explicitly? Probably nothing.
Implicitly? Nukes.
That's where the buck stops in geopolitics.
Ultimately, all international interaction is backed by implicit threat of war - and, for past couple decades, nukes are the trump card. The world is divided between the "haves", and the "have nots", and the "have nots" can't do anything if the "haves" put the nuclear option onto the table.
Of course, in polite company, nothing ever gets to that stage; the jobs of the leaders, diplomats, advisers, etc. is to keep everything low-key enough to not escalate beyond horse trading and strongly-worded letters. But everyone is acutely aware that the threat of violence is implicitly always there, and who can credibly threaten whom.
Haha what a crackers comment. Threatening to nuke the Netherlands if ASML sells a lithography machine to China, what are you smoking. The Dutch would probably blow up the ASML factory and short the entire stock market the day before if that sabre was even rattled. Bye bye tech.
the Netherlands (and most of the European countries) has the skills to build nukes and ICBM in 6 months if it wanted to. The tech is 80 years old at this point.
Whoever is planning on building a self-sufficient off-world colony for the survival of the human race, don’t forget to invite ASML along for the trip!
How many decades away are we from being able to manufacture high-end consumer-grade silicon somewhere other than on earth?
It makes the challenges of safe habitation and providing other essential resources seem much simpler by comparison.
Not one mention of Zeiss? Those mirrors are quite the story themselve. The light source also isn't actually being done by asml, it's trumpf
The semiconductor supply chain is bonkers... would like to have a diagram of the whole thing, including the special quartz mine in NC
There's this site[1] which doesn't go into that much depth but is still neat to explore
There are other quartz mines that can produce the purity needed for the crucibles
agree, firing ion beams to make the mirror perfect one molecule at a time(they are declared the most precise mirrors on earth). This stuff is beyond wild. Not that I believe this stuff came from alien technology but if anything could be said to have not originated on earth this would be a strong candidate. And barely a hundred years ago we just figuring out flight at kitty hawk and now you have technology like this, its really amazing.
Everyone loves the electron beam etching. But no one asks how they know where to etch, which is what the most expensive machines do, I.e. mirror surface metrology. It's surprisingly hard to "just measure" the shape and roughness of these things
And that ASML is majority owned by Carl Zeis, a German company.
If anything it's the other way round. Asml owns 25% of Zeiss SMT. Source: I work there
And what about all the parts that Zeiss is using? That's basically Milton Friedman on how a pencil is made, but on steroids:
Not really. A block of glass arrives at our facility. It undergoes a shitton of processing steps (much longer than you'd think) with atomic-precision measurements between the steps. All of the high end tools are self-developed and self-built. The mirror at the end does not have much in common with the block of glass at the start.
Also see "I Pencil" by Leonard Read (1958).
It is funny how “the race is on” when we have ASML/ZEISS monopoly in this sector.
Could this fail in some way and cause a resonance cascade?
Not if we follow strict operating procedures, Gordon.
Interesting $350M similar price to an Airbus 380 when it was sold new.
Still no where near Ford class Aircraft carrier at $13 billion each.
Remind me again why we're in an AI arms race? What's the end goal. Market dominance for a few years?
Good luck cloning that machine.