3 ms·

I have no digits, but it seems that at least bruteforcing the volumes is in ways with how much chips Apple + AMD + Qualcomm ship. EUV productivity is a big pro

I have no digits, but it seems that at least bruteforcing the volumes is in ways with how much chips Apple + AMD + Qualcomm ship. EUV productivity is a big problem. Currently machines are stopped every few shifts for cleaning tin from mirrors. Even without that, light sources never managed to live to the original power output promise. There are few known ways to produce EUV light besides tin plasma. One is in using some plasmonic quantum processes, I can't even fathom how to describe, to produce microwatts of EUV. The other is a free electron laser to produce potentially kilowatts of it non-stop. The later approach requires to build the whole fab around a synchrotron, a commitment currently nobody can take even with current surreal capex numbers.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
Maybe we should rebuild the Large Hadron Collider as the core of a silicon fab/s
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Particle pipes for semi fabs (a la oil pipelines) would be a cool bit of retrofuturist-y world building
namibj 5y ago
Oh they could do the latter, they just need to trust it's gonna work.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
There is such a facility, not far away from me. Though not that much free space around it anymore. https://www.xfel.eu/ https://www.xfel.eu/ https://openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=17&lat=53.58825&lon=9.83101&layers=B000 https://openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=17&lat=53.58825&lon...
craigjb 5y ago
Equipment for ion implantation already includes mini accelerators [1] [2]. The semiconductor equipment industry in general has many machines that feel like they came out of a physics lab into a semi fab. For example, plasma dry-etching or deep-reactive ion etching. EUV litho is just one of many very interesting problems--currently the bottleneck so it's talked about a lot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_implantation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_implantation [2] https://www.axcelis.com/products/purion-xe-series-high-energy-ion-implantation/ https://www.axcelis.com/products/purion-xe-series-high-energ... edit: add link to cool ion implanter machine pics

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

Maybe we should rebuild the Large Hadron Collider as the core of a silicon fab/s

mhh__ 5y ago
Particle pipes for semi fabs (a la oil pipelines) would be a cool bit of retrofuturist-y world building

namibj 5y ago

Oh they could do the latter, they just need to trust it's gonna work.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago

There is such a facility, not far away from me. Though not that much free space around it anymore. https://www.xfel.eu/ https://www.xfel.eu/ https://openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=17&lat=53.58825&lon=9.83101&layers=B000 https://openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=17&lat=53.58825&lon...

craigjb 5y ago

Equipment for ion implantation already includes mini accelerators [1] [2]. The semiconductor equipment industry in general has many machines that feel like they came out of a physics lab into a semi fab. For example, plasma dry-etching or deep-reactive ion etching. EUV litho is just one of many very interesting problems--currently the bottleneck so it's talked about a lot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_implantation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_implantation [2] https://www.axcelis.com/products/purion-xe-series-high-energy-ion-implantation/ https://www.axcelis.com/products/purion-xe-series-high-energ... edit: add link to cool ion implanter machine pics