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Is it though? The laser needed for the laser-induced plasma EUV source are nothing you can buy of-the-shelve and is nothing trivial to design and Trumpf has lot
by welterde 4y ago
Is it though? The laser needed for the laser-induced plasma EUV source are nothing you can buy of-the-shelve and is nothing trivial to design and Trumpf has lots of expertise in this area (since they are not just a supplier for lasers, but use the lasers themselves for machine tools). Could another company have made it? Probably! But the same is true for the whole EUV light source, since Cymer wasn't the only game in town after all (there were a number of other companies working on it in the US and in Europe) - with ASML also collaborating with several potential competing suppliers at the same time.
But no one really cares about anyone but the winners in the end, so only ASML and Trumpf are left standing in the end to bask in the glory.
- xadhominemx 4y agoUh yes of course there were several competing potential suppliers of light sources (just as there were entire EUV systems) but all the other ones didn’t work and were not close to working. That is the definition of a critical enabling technology. Cymer was in fact the only game in town.
- welterde 4y agoOnly one that worked is patently incorrect, since early ASML R&D units shipped with non-cymer EUV light sources (some Philips collaboration iirc). Best performance at the time maybe (be it reliability/output power/size/..), but not the only one that worked at all, so no..
- xadhominemx 4y agoThey other light sources were orders of magnitude below the required brightness with no path to required commercial brightness, ie they didn’t work
- welterde 4y agoI don't think that was true. Gigaphoton achieved similar numbers to Cymer roughly a year later with a very similar design idea (so unclear why they would have had no path forward? they are still on-par today with Cymer as far as I can tell), XTREME was not too far behind (within factor 3 I would say).