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> 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 powerf
by 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.
- wtallis 3y agoR&D and tooling costs have grown enormously to bring new fab process nodes online, but the actual per-wafer costs of materials and operating expenses historically haven't been growing to the same alarming degree. But that's changing, as new nodes are increasingly relying on power-hungry tools with low throughput that wear out mask sets at an unprecedented rate. It's not implausible for the industry to reach a point where new leading-edge processes will never mature to the point that they make economic sense for the low-cost applications that currently stay a few nodes behind the leading edge.
- viscanti 3y agoThe problem here would be that if mask sets wear out at an unprecedented rate, it might not make sense to use these cutting edge nodes in the future (if/when we're several nodes ahead by then) for the things that currently use older nodes. Maybe Moore's law is dead for the types of things that stay 2 or 3 nodes behind state of the art all the time.
- cubefox 3y agoThat was because of competition. The cost per transistor actually went down by a lot. If it soon goes up significantly, it will stop to make economic sense to increase transistor density any further. Why pay the same amount of money for a less powerful chip? Maybe it will make sense for mobile SoCs or some other energy constrained applications which benefit from lower power draw of smaller process node chips. But power efficiency can outweigh lower absolute performance only to some degree.
- 3y ago
- tlb 3y agoStill, 1 MWh is a tiny fraction of the power those 100 wafers worth of chips will consume in their lifetime. So if we can reduce power consumption with smaller features, it's worth using more laser power.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI’d note that quote is 14 years old - hopefully there’s been some R&D over that time!
- throwawaylinux 3y agoStill, ASML's latest EUV machine, the 3600D, does draw 1.3 megawatts. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/937966/000093796622000013/asml-20211231.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/937966/0000937966220... But when it comes to cost, evidently replacing many passes and other complicated processes with DUV machines with fewer EUV passes is a net win. And the energy required to create these chips must be a small fraction of the energy they will use in their lifetimes, so improved efficiency of the smaller nodes enabled by EUV would surely be a win, all else being equal.
- ben_w 3y agoThat makes me wonder (as someone who has merely heard of the two technologies and knows nothing much about either beyond the Wikipedia page) why it's not using a free electron laser? Aren't those tuneable to any wavelength down to X-rays?
- namibj 3y agoGlobal foundries banked on that, and a Japanese laboratory is building/running a demonstrator.
- amelius 3y agoIsn't that similar to synchrotron x-rays? I just watched a video where they say that that's what people started with before they went with the tin plasma method.
- kleton 3y agoIt is somewhat likely that effective free electron laser is locked up behind the invention secrecy act of 1951 as a critical DOD tech.
- LargoLasskhyfv 3y agoIs it? And what is "effective? Tabletop? Deskside? Or this: https://www.xfel.eu/ https://www.xfel.eu/ ?
- ben_w 3y agoXFEL is > Wavelength 0.05 to 4.7 nanometres - https://www.xfel.eu/facility/overview/facts_amp_figures/index_eng.html https://www.xfel.eu/facility/overview/facts_amp_figures/inde... which is sufficient and possibly excessive. Not that I know anything about any of the other considerations in such things. Is 3.4 km "too big"? Is €1.22 bn "too expensive"?
- civilitty 3y agoThat's called electron-beam lithography: > This form of maskless lithography has high resolution but low throughput, limiting its usage to photomask fabrication, low-volume production of semiconductor devices, and research and development. [1] The beam has to scan across the entire wafer instead of exposing it all at once, so it's extremely slow and uneconomical for mass production. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-beam_lithography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-beam_lithography
- winternewt 3y agoI wonder what the possibilities for a fundamentally different manufacture method are. For example, what if we could program a layout into DNA and have biological agents construct it?
- RetroTechie 3y agoWell, unless one devises a way to break up atoms + rearrange those in such a way as to turn protons, neutrons, quarks etc. into compute machinery, we're stuck with individual atoms (or small groups of those) as the smallest possible building blocks. And thus Moore's law will hit a brick wall at some point. 3D structures (stacks w/ many layers of transistors & interconnect) will help, but make thermal issues more difficult than they already are. Kind of like (iirc) the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope might be used to pick up & manipulate individual atoms. Self-organizing materials like DNA might make that process easier, not scale it down further.
- ansible 3y agoRead up on Molecular Nanotechnology.
- winternewt 3y agoPerhaps the thermal issues could be solved with LK99 :)
- HPsquared 3y agoIn other words, 10 kWh per wafer - a couple of dollars per wafer in energy costs.
- rsweeney21 3y agoCame here to make the exact same comment. I can't help but feel like some day we will forget how we were able to make such amazing machines.
- Agathos 3y agoTwo must watch videos about the whole process: https://youtu.be/5Ge2RcvDlgw https://youtu.be/5Ge2RcvDlgw https://youtu.be/pfU20SAR21A https://youtu.be/pfU20SAR21A (Typed on a device made by this process, which I still don’t quite believe.)
- NortySpock 3y agoTwice. They have to hit the molten droplet twice. Once "gently" to deform it briefly into a concave shape, and the second, harder pulse to actually activate the droplet to emit extreme ultraviolet light Asianometry on EUV. Skip to 10m50s. https://youtu.be/5Ge2RcvDlgw https://youtu.be/5Ge2RcvDlgw
- fennecfoxy 3y agoNot only do they hit it twice, but they're also depositing and hitting it twice _50,000_ times every second! https://www.asml.com/en/technology/lithography-principles/light-and-lasers#:~:text=Then%20a%20more%20powerful%20laser,repeated%2050%2C000%20times%20every%20second https://www.asml.com/en/technology/lithography-principles/li.... Just absolutely insane engineering going on there.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoAnyone who reads these descriptions and doesn’t realize this is literally the magic of sorcerers predicted in our fantasy lore have lost the ability to dream. What an amazing time to be alive.
- dougmwne 3y agoThe process sure, but the end product? Sand awoken, talking, thinking, creating, dreaming. Merlin was not so powerful.
- AshamedCaptain 3y agoI'm quite sure that the people working on this see lots and lots of barely holding duct tape in what you describe as "magic".
- ThrowawayTestr 3y agoAnd yet that duct-taped machine can consistently fire two laser beams at a single droplet of molten tin hundreds of times an hour. Pretty magic if you ask me.
- 3y ago
- nntwozz 3y agoIf you like that and want to know more Asianometry did a deep dive on this process: https://youtu.be/5Ge2RcvDlgw https://youtu.be/5Ge2RcvDlgw A short video showing the laser in action: https://youtu.be/NHSR6AHNiDs https://youtu.be/NHSR6AHNiDs
- ksec 3y ago>This is incredible and feels like the most sci-fi sentence I've read in a long time. And that is sad part of so called "Tech" today. Zero appreciation of it outside of the minorities. They are doing is on a massive scale, extreme precision, high cost of electricity, insane difficulty in both designing chips and production. And yet HN thinks all the hardware chips today are over priced and absurdly expensive.
- incompatible 3y agoIt's a bit worse than "zero appreciation" in some cases, it's people using the results from hundreds of years of advances in science and engineering to proudly post their anti-scientific viewpoints.
- abwizz 3y agorather common thou, as it should be. i.e. there absolutely cannot be any obligation to subscribe to the ideology of either team eddison or team westinghouse in order to make use of a light switch.
- machina_ex_deus 3y ago[flagged]
- imtringued 3y agoI'm sorry but CO2 being the primary driver of climate change was predicted in the 50s. Back then it was just a hypothesis and now it is undeniable. Meanwhile the competition that was "bullied into submission" made ridiculous claims like global cooling all the way until 2014. Inform yourself about a topic before talking about it. Here is the ancient paper: [1] If you check the prediction in the abstract it mentions doubling CO2 levels, which means going from 310ppm (1955) [2] to 417ppm today or a 33% increase. The paper predicts a 3.6°C increase and 33% of that is around 1.18°C which is dead on. The temperature record goes back to 1880 but when you look at the relative warming then 1950 and 1880 had the same temperature [3] so it doesn't matter that IPCC numbers start from 1880 instead of 1950. [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.2153-3490.1956.tb01206.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.2153-3490.... [2] https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/atmospheric-concentration-of-carbon-dioxide-5/download.table https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/atmospheric-co... [3] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ContentWOC/images/globaltemp/global_gis_2022_chart.png https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ContentWOC/images/globalte...
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- jasonwatkinspdx 3y agoEven more crazy that process runs at 50khz, that is vaporizing 50,000 droplets per second. This is necessary because the overall efficiency is really poor vs the energy density they need on the chip to react with resist.
- zeristor 3y agoThis raised all sorts of questions I was going to ask about the Physics, but I found this OpenAccess paper I’ll go through: “Physics of laser-driven tin plasma sources of EUV radiation for nanolithography” (2019) https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6595/ab3302 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6595/ab3302
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- zapkyeskrill 3y agoIn a moment of brain fart I imagined this process happening on the end device, us needing to /refuel/ the devices every now and then ...
- arethuza 3y agoThere are some fascinating videos on YouTube from Zeiss, who do the optical systems for the ASML machines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6c3vzIGo9o&t=632s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6c3vzIGo9o&t=632s
- WeylandYutani 3y agoWell it did take them 30 years to get working and lots of money. That's why ASML doesn't have any competition: everyone else gave up.