6 ms·

It'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 collimate

It'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 ago
The 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 ago
  Cost 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 ago
    R&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 ago
      The 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 ago
    That 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.
    - throwawaylinux 3y ago
      > That was because of competition. The cost per transistor actually went down by a lot. I'm not talking about the marginal cost to make the device, I'm talking about the R&D and capital expenditure to develop and build the machines for the next node. You can be reductive and say it always boils down to competition, but then you would also say that ultimately shrinking will end when it can no longer compete with mature nodes. Competition in both cases. So I'm not sure what exactly that's getting at. > 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? That's not strictly true, performance of a transistor still has value. Companies like Apple pay premiums to get in early on leading edge nodes, more per device than the mature nodes they move from.
      - cubefox 3y ago
        Competition with "mature nodes" is different in the sense that here one company (like TSMC) will be "competing" with itself. They will just stop building next gen fabs if their chips wouldn't sell. > That's not strictly true, performance of a transistor still has value. Companies like Apple pay premiums to get in early on leading edge nodes, more per device than the mature nodes they move from. Apple can't increase the price of their product arbitrarily. So if the price per performance increases, the new iPhone would be slower than the old one. Maybe people will still buy it if it has better power efficiency, but that is a trade-off which has its limits.
        mschuster91 3y ago
tlb 3y ago
Still, 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 ago
I’d note that quote is 14 years old - hopefully there’s been some R&D over that time!
- throwawaylinux 3y ago
  Still, 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 ago
That 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 ago
  Global foundries banked on that, and a Japanese laboratory is building/running a demonstrator.
- amelius 3y ago
  Isn'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 ago
  It 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 ago
    Is it? And what is "effective? Tabletop? Deskside? Or this: https://www.xfel.eu/ https://www.xfel.eu/ ?
    - ben_w 3y ago
      XFEL 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 ago
  That'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 ago
I 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 ago
  Well, 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 ago
    Read up on Molecular Nanotechnology.
  - winternewt 3y ago
    Perhaps the thermal issues could be solved with LK99 :)
HPsquared 3y ago
In other words, 10 kWh per wafer - a couple of dollars per wafer in energy costs.

_hypx 3y ago

The 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 ago
Cost 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 ago
  R&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 ago
    The 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 ago
  That 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.
  - throwawaylinux 3y ago
    > That was because of competition. The cost per transistor actually went down by a lot. I'm not talking about the marginal cost to make the device, I'm talking about the R&D and capital expenditure to develop and build the machines for the next node. You can be reductive and say it always boils down to competition, but then you would also say that ultimately shrinking will end when it can no longer compete with mature nodes. Competition in both cases. So I'm not sure what exactly that's getting at. > 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? That's not strictly true, performance of a transistor still has value. Companies like Apple pay premiums to get in early on leading edge nodes, more per device than the mature nodes they move from.
    - cubefox 3y ago
      Competition with "mature nodes" is different in the sense that here one company (like TSMC) will be "competing" with itself. They will just stop building next gen fabs if their chips wouldn't sell. > That's not strictly true, performance of a transistor still has value. Companies like Apple pay premiums to get in early on leading edge nodes, more per device than the mature nodes they move from. Apple can't increase the price of their product arbitrarily. So if the price per performance increases, the new iPhone would be slower than the old one. Maybe people will still buy it if it has better power efficiency, but that is a trade-off which has its limits.
      - mschuster91 3y ago

tlb 3y ago

Still, 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 ago

I’d note that quote is 14 years old - hopefully there’s been some R&D over that time!

throwawaylinux 3y ago
Still, 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 ago

That 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 ago
Global foundries banked on that, and a Japanese laboratory is building/running a demonstrator.
amelius 3y ago
Isn'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 ago
It 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 ago
  Is it? And what is "effective? Tabletop? Deskside? Or this: https://www.xfel.eu/ https://www.xfel.eu/ ?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    XFEL 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 ago
That'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 ago

I 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 ago
Well, 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 ago
  Read up on Molecular Nanotechnology.
- winternewt 3y ago
  Perhaps the thermal issues could be solved with LK99 :)

HPsquared 3y ago

In other words, 10 kWh per wafer - a couple of dollars per wafer in energy costs.