8 ms·
ASML EUV lithography machine could keep Moore’s Law on track
- tgtweak 3y agoIs this the one that Intel is getting first dibs on for the next few generations? Looks like these fabrication paradigms generally work on Moore's law for some time before tapering off (S curve to some degree) but the discovery of a new paradigm can slow down the overall trendline if it takes too long to commercialize.
- bloggie 3y agoASML currently has a market cap larger than Intel. That has nothing to do with their sales but puts into perspective how important this technology is relative to all of Intel's activities. TSMC has been reported as their biggest client (https://www.reuters.com/technology/asml-shares-fall-7-after-tsmc-says-its-cutting-capital-spending-2022-10-13/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/asml-shares-fall-7-after-...)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zgluck 3y agoHuh, wow. ASML: $287B AMD: $182B Intel: $154B
- nine_k 3y agoSomebody noticed that progress is usually a stack of sigmoids, not an uneventful and plain upwards curve.
- fotta 3y agoIntel has purchased the high-NA EUV machines[0] but I can't find any source on exclusivity. [0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-orders-asml-machine-still-drawing-board-chipmakers-look-an-edge-2022-01-19/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-orders-asml-machine...
- knewter 3y agoAs I understand it, exclusivity with ASML comes solely from their limited production capacity. Just buy all the machines for the year.
- TheUnhinged 3y agoIntel is getting the first prototype(s), in a few years from now. Then add a a year or two before those EXE’s are actually used for volume manufacturing. No exclusivity, as it’s ASML business model to work fairly with all semiconductor manufacturers.
- tgtweak 3y agoThey have the prototypes now, and are talking about entering mass production 2H 2024 [1]. From what I read, Intel has already received and taped out 18A and 20A using these new high-NA machines [2] >Intel has announced that manufacturing of 18A-node chips will commence in H2 2024, six months ahead of schedule. According to a roadmap released last year, this node will be Intel’s first to employ high-NA lithography. It’s not clear whether this means that the next-gen EUV technology makes its debut in production a little earlier than expected. Last January, ASML CEO Peter Wennink told investors that he expected high-volume high-NA manufacturing to start in 2025 or 2026. ASML high NA Credit: ASML ASML’s first high-NA system, the Twinscan EXE:5000, is fully production-capable, but chip manufacturers will initially use it for process development. The first unit will ship in H1 2023, with Intel on the receiving end. The US processor maker also placed the first order for the EXE:5000’s successor, the EXE:5200. The swift adoption of high-NA is an important element in Intel’s strategy to regain “unquestioned leadership” in the semiconductor industry by 2025. [1]https://bits-chips.nl/artikel/intel-moves-high-na-node-up-6-months/ https://bits-chips.nl/artikel/intel-moves-high-na-node-up-6-... [2]https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-completes-development-of-18a-20a-nodes https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-completes-developmen...
- crote 3y agoNot going to happen. Remember, TSMC manufactures chips for Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Google, and a looot of other companies. They own about 60% of the cutting-edge fab capacity in the world, while Intel was basically an "also ran" during the transition to EUV. ASML is never going to tie themselves to a single customer like that, let alone one which isn't even the market leader. High-NA is a massive technological change, and all the major players have already ordered their machines. Intel was simply the first to complete their order in a desperate attempt to avoid a repeat of their EUV debacle, but they'll receive their new toy at most a month or two earlier than their competition.
- tgtweak 3y agoFirst dibs is not exclusivity, they simply were the first to order it and will be the first to receive the initial machines giving them a calendar advantage. I assume these will be made available to Intel Fab customers as well at internally to Intel, since they are opening up 3rd party fabrication at a service offering.
- martin_drapeau 3y agoI worked at Imec back in 2005 alongside the teams installing and researching the first EUV machines from ASML. Never thought they’d get it to work given the technological challenges. Laser-pulsed tin plasma, mirrors instead of lenses and vacuum exposure just to name a few! Glad they got it working so we can print smaller at scale.
- throwawaylinux 3y agoWhat were the challenges you were seeing or heard were the biggest? The light source?
- TheUnhinged 3y agoEverything was a challenge with EUV—the source, the vacuum, the mirrors, the reflective reticle, getting sufficient throughput…
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Animats 3y agoThere were years of hope in the semiconductor industry that somebody would come up with something better rather than having to make that nightmare work. Alternatives were tried. Synchrotron EUV sources. (works, but huge). Linear accelerators (The SLAC beamline was used as a light source as a test). X-ray lasers (don't work yet). Electron beam lithography (works, but too slow.) There's got to be a better way to do this.
- martin_drapeau 3y agoAt Imec I recall electron beam lithography was investigated but just too slow. E-beam was analogous to an inkjet printer.
- Animats 3y ago
- esperent 3y ago> EUV necessitates an entirely new way to generate light. It’s a remarkably complex process that involves hitting molten tin droplets in midflight with a powerful CO2 laser. The laser vaporizes the tin into a plasma, emitting a spectrum of photonic energy. From this spectrum, the EUV optics harvest the required 13.5-nm wavelength and direct it through a series of mirrors before it is reflected off a patterned mask to project that pattern onto the wafer This is incredible and feels like the most sci-fi sentence I've read in a long time. It's unbelievable to think that this works, not just in a lab, but in commercial systems that will produce hundreds of chip wafers an hour (>100 anyway, they didn't clarify further).
- sbierwagen 3y agoIt's also terribly inefficient. EUV "mirrors" eat 30% of the incoming light. Since they have such a narrow reflective range and the source light isn't collimated or coherent, you have to use a bunch of them. By the time you're at the mask, you've lost 96% of the light. As a result: >Hynix reported at the 2009 EUV Symposium that the wall plug efficiency was ~0.02% for EUV, i.e., to get 200-watts at intermediate focus for 100 wafers-per-hour, one would require 1-megawatt of input power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithograph... It's an damn good question of how much further this can scale. EUV photons are a lot more like x-rays than they are visible light. They're energetic enough now they're inflicting ionization effects on photoresist material, blurring the exposed area with secondary electron scatter. The fundamental limit of electronic transistors, ones made out of single molecules, are going to be tough to make with lithography.
- _hypx 3y agoThe final challenge will be cost: With every iteration, costs increase dramatically. At some point, it simply ceases to make sense to scale down transistors any further.
- throwawaylinux 3y agoCost has been the challenge for the past 30-40 years at least. Many semiconductor manufacturers have folded, dropped out, or merged over the years due to costs putting development of the next node out of their reach. If the remaining 3 drop out of the race, they will be following the same pattern as many before.
- nntwozz 3y agoMoore's law was never really "on track". Asianometry nailed this topic beautifully in this video: https://youtu.be/nRJgvX6P8dI https://youtu.be/nRJgvX6P8dI
- dcormier 3y agoI recently had an opportunity to chat with a machinist who works for a shop that makes some parts for ASML’s machines. He showed me a picture of a couple of parts he finished that day. He said they weighed about a hundred pounds sitting there on the table, but at the acceleration they experience in the machine, they weigh roughy the same as a Toyota Tacoma.
- iamgopal 3y agoWe make centrifuge, 1000g is routine for most centrifuges.
- TheUnhinged 3y agoNow imagine all of this with a precision of a few nanometers…
- AareyBaba 3y agoAnd for perspective, 2nm is approximately how much your fingernail grows in the time it took to read this sentence. (3.47mm per month)/(30 * 24 * 60 * 60 seconds) = 1.33nm/second
- archgoon 3y ago[dead]
- moritzwarhier 3y agoNow this was a great and memorable comparison, thanks.
- abwizz 3y agoany tipps for centrifuge related youtuber content?
- iamgopal 3y ago
- lockhouse 3y agoProcessing power is fine these days. It’s memory that I feel has stagnated. The standard computer configuration has been stuck at 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of SSD storage forever.
- mikewarot 3y agoVon Neuman's architecture has run out of steam. The fact that most transistors in a computer at any given moment are idle seems to be a huge waste. What if you could just have a computational fabric that lets you have one instruction per cell, and run whole programs in parallel? FPGAs do that, but the "smart" routing fabric in them makes compiling code to them take hours or days. If you eliminate the switching fabric on an FPGA, you are left with a grid of Look Up Tables (LUTS) each connected to their neighbors. The result is a Turing Complete computer that works exclusively in parallel.
- cobalt 3y agobuild your own, it's not that expensive to 4x both those numbers
- wtallis 3y ago"The standard computer configuration" stopped referring to desktops long before 8GB DRAM + 256GB SSD went mainstream.
- taneq 3y agoDepends on your demographic, I guess. My 8-year-old desktop was built with 16GB and that was middle of the road even then. Only a 64GB SSD at the start, though. I didn't see laptops really take over from desktops for a few years after that.
- wtallis 3y agoYour story doesn't really add up. 8 years ago would have been 2015, at which point 64GB drives had been dropped from most consumer SSD product lines for at least a year, and laptop sales had been outnumbering desktop sales by a wide margin for many years. I don't think you realize how thoroughly unrepresentative your experiences and purchasing choices have been.
- rowanG077 3y agoWhy aren't we going electron lithography? As a laymen I think it should easily be able to surpass EUV in terms of resolution. I would imagine there are very good reasons why we aren't seeing it.
- barelyauser 3y agoYou may be able to surpass it in resolution but you can't surpass it in terms of throughput.
- _hypx 3y agoElectrons are electrically charged, so a beam of electrons will interfere with itself. The only way around this is to have a very narrow beam, but that kills throughput.
- bilsbie 3y agoHow about muons then?
- icapybara 3y agoHow should we produce the muons?
- m00x 3y agoMuonic generator, ofc.
- WantonQuantum 3y agoJust for the fun of it, I googled muon production and found this at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland: https://www.psi.ch/en/media/the-sms-muon-source https://www.psi.ch/en/media/the-sms-muon-source It does highlight some potential pitfalls. Chiefly the rapid decay of muons and dealing decay particles. Also you need a source of high energy protons. Proton lithograhy anyone?
- wuming2 3y agoPeak applications require the latest and most powerful tech. With it’s colossal trail of pollution from manufacturing. For the rest I often wonder if would not be better for the environment to re-purpose older, already made tech. Plenty of embedded systems grinding on for a long time. And user facing applications lack one thing: public stats of peak system usage. When confronted with a new purchase we should be handed over a sheet of our own and peers statistics. Producers and service providers have them anyway.
- WantonQuantum 3y agoAgree 100%. In an ideal world, the cost of everything we buy would include the real costs of pollution (including greenhouse gases), depletion of common resources such as water, and recycling or otherwise accounting for the environmental impact after use. As you say, suddenly those 5 year old phones and computers would be economically attractive again. With a knock-on effect that websites and software would cater more for older devices. But we don't live in an ideal world. We live in a literal Tragedy Of The Commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons). Note that I'm not at all saying that we shouldn't have companies like ASML researching processes like this - more efficient chips are good for the environment and the economy.
- oezi 3y agoLots of old foundries are still producing old chips.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
- beebeepka 3y agoWhat surprised me the most is how little telemetry they have, almost none of it in real time. I guess the industry is used to just eating up the cost defects but it was mind blowing (or eye opening) to me.
- apienx 3y agoThe industry's currently shipping chips based on the 3nm process. I understand that it's mostly a marketing term (i.e. non-standardized), but I assume the actual transistor channel is within that order of magnitude. Knowing that a silicon atom is larger than 0.1 nm, how can we possibly keep Moore's Law on track? It feels like we're close to hitting fundamental limits. Any insights would be much appreciated. Thanks!
- wetpaws 3y ago[dead]
- dougmwne 3y agoSure, we are close to the end of silicon semiconductor improvements. And Moores law could be near its end. In fact the price per transistor has not been dropping recently, so it may be over already. If there’s hope for the future, it’s that there are many other computing technologies besides traditional silicon that show potential, so maybe the torch will be passed to quantum, or superconductors or dna or something else.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y agoWe are ridiculously far from physical limits in our current artificial computers (both theoretical [1], and practical [2]). For more technical details see Jim Keller: [3] [4] [5]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation [2] The ~12 watts computer inside each living human adult skull (and perhaps each eukaryote cell [6]) is still the state-of-the-art, for quite some time. [3] 2021, Jim Keller: The Secret to Moore's Law, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x17jIKQf9hE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x17jIKQf9hE [4] 2019, Jim Keller: Moore’s Law is Not Dead, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc [5] 2023, Change w/ Jim Keller, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzgyksS5pX8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzgyksS5pX8 [6] Our computers aren't yet able of polycomputation, where the computation topology, data, and functions depend on the observer, instead of computation in a passive implementation, once done forever set in s̶t̶o̶n̶e̶ silicon, 2023, Michael Levin, Agency, Attractors, & Observer-Dependent Computation in Biology & Beyond, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whZRH7IGAq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whZRH7IGAq0
- andy_ppp 3y agoHow does 13.5nm light etch features of 7nm and lower? I can sort of see how ultra pure water can focus the light (immersion lithography) and multi patterning (I’m not sure how this works really, I would have thought shining light through two masks would make things even more blurry). When the photon hits the silicon why isn’t the dot 13.5nm?
- glic3rinu 3y agomasks dont have the actual shape, but shapes accounting for wave interference patterns that will end up producing the final shape when EUV light passes through. I believe the process of comming up with the correct intereference pattern takes weeks of supercomputing.
- abwizz 3y agosounds legit, any sources?
- mikewarot 3y agoWe discussed this 4 months ago in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35301207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35301207
- glic3rinu 3y agoJim Keller himself talks about this a little bit here https://www.youtube.com/live/oIG9ztQw2Gc?feature=share&t=1227 https://www.youtube.com/live/oIG9ztQw2Gc?feature=share&t=122... I think I've listen to asianometry (YT channel) talk about this too, but I am unable to find any clip now where he explicitly talks about interference lithography...
- atq2119 3y agoIt does seem magical. The one thing I can answer is that multi-patterning does not shine light through two masks simultaneously. Instead, it consists of multiple separate steps. I think for the rest, the point is that light arriving on the waver is not a binary thing, but due to refraction and self-interference light arrives in variable intensities. So within difficult constraints, this allows you to control the area in which the intensity is below our above certain thresholds. I assume that if you then manage to control the chemistry just right, you can then produce features that are smaller than the wavelength of the light -- under severe constraints of what shapes you can produce. You definitely do not get to produce an arbitrary bitmap of sub-wavelength pixel size.
- javaunsafe2019 3y agoOne layman question here maybe someone with better knowledge of the field can answer: could it make sense at some point to work without masks and lights and have only large scale laser arrays that write the structures directly but in the smallest possible scale (electrons)? Wouldn’t such an array be more energy efficient, be able to acquire smaller scales and trough the parallel process at some point be as fast as current systems using masks + light?
- anabab 3y ago[dead]
- dermesser 3y agoThis is called electron beam writing, and is done routinely in research settings and to write the lithography masks, but does usually not have the required throughput for a production line. The upside of mask-based lithography is that all structures are exposed at once.
- javaunsafe2019 3y agoThank you for your answer - that’s why I thought about parallel beams in a big scale.
- dermesser 3y agoA single beam column with the machine around it costs millions already, and takes quite some space. Wafers are simply not large enough to accommodate more than, I'd guess, two or three columns at the same time. Each with independent optics. A somewhat simple 2x2 cm Si photonics Chip in my line of work takes about 24h exposure for two layers - a full scale wafer is hundreds of times larger, more complex, and has dozens of layers. The math, physics, and geometry just don't really work out (yet)
- ddkn435 3y agoThank you very much for your response and explanation. Und viele Grüße aus Hamburg.
- brancz 3y agoIs there any indication that it’s possible to build subatomic size transistors? Last I checked the data, transistors are already only a few atoms in size (silicon and carbon atoms are somewhere in the 0.3nm range), and it was a widely held opinion that it would stop at that if not much sooner. That would keep Moore’s law alive for a bit longer at best but the end does seem in sight. Even considering all of that the economics seem to have already stagnated in cost for performance.[1] [1] http://databasearchitects.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-great-cpu-stagnation.html?m=1 http://databasearchitects.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-great-cpu...
- automatic6131 3y agoBear in mind, when silicon foundries say they have an Xnm process, nothing in that process is actually Xnm. TSMCs 2nm process does not make transistors 2nm wide[1]. They are in fact, approximately 40-50nm wide. The process number is a marketing number, and what changes each generation is actually transistor geometry (here you'll see terms like FinFET and GAA transistor and such, plus some process improvements that cause "half" generations) [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process But yeah, the fact that latest process nodes actually increase in cost is why people say "Moore's law is dead". Performance improves, but to keep the trendline roughly exponential, many things have had to give since the late 2000s. Such as: cost per wafer, power usage for max performance etc.
- oznog 3y agoMoore's Law is not engineering, it's economics. The limits of physics can be surpassed with parallelization. Moore's law is a reflection of the private and business market's desire/need for ever greater efficiency. There is no limit.