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Pretty much all of this has been public knowledge for a decade, or even longer. The technology behind EUV is quite simple on paper, the hard part is getting it

by crote 3y ago

Pretty much all of this has been public knowledge for a decade, or even longer. The technology behind EUV is quite simple on paper, the hard part is getting it to work reliably. It would take you years to reverse engineer it even if you had unlimited physical access to a working machine, and all the truly secret sauce is in all the measurement and calibration equipment around it.

SoKamil 3y ago
We are now two layers deep into the secret sauce. I want to know what the secret sauce of the measurement and calibration equipment is!
- bloggie 3y ago
  Hi, I work in laser measurement and calibration. There is no secret sauce; you take a physical phenomenon that translates optical power or energy into an electrical signal, measure that signal, then find the sensitivity value of that phenomenon and account for any other effects such as ambient temperature, fill factor, linearity, parasitics etc. and then prove that your calculations are correct by comparing them with NIST/PTB.
Animats 3y ago
> The technology behind EUV is quite simple on paper, the hard part is getting it to work reliably. EUV machines are a terrible approach to the problem made to work through a huge amount of effort. Look at the size of those things. All to get a little burst of soft X-rays and focus it on a mask and wafer. With a light source that works by using lasers to vaporize a droplet of tin falling in vacuum. Creating an internal mess that has to be cleaned up. For a decade, people in wafer fab hoped there would be some other way to do this. Small synchrotrons. X-ray lasers. E-beam machines. But those approaches all fizzled out. So what ought to be a physics experiment run occasionally was hammered into being a production technology. Examples of a commercial technology that hard which went mainstream are rare. There was the image orthicon.[1] That's a TV camera tube. Previous technologies needed very bright light. Zworklin's iconoscope accumulated the image over an entire frame time, but photon to electron conversion was very inefficient. Farnsworth's image dissector had much more efficient photon to electron conversion, because it had a photomultiplier built into the tube, but only the light received from the pixel currently under the scanning beam contributed to the output - there was no full-frame accumulation. So RCA developed the image orthicon, which combined both of those technologies. It was insanely complicated and expensive. The tube alone cost about US$10,000 in the 1950. Color required three tubes. The tubes required something like ten different power supplies, and control and alignment required hundreds of adjustments. Here's someone trying to restore one.[2] All those racks of equipment for one camera. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Image_orthicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Image_orthic... [2] http://earlytelevision.org/rca_tk41_restoration.html http://earlytelevision.org/rca_tk41_restoration.html
- Arrath 3y ago
  > For a decade, people in wafer fab hoped there would be some other way to do this. Small synchrotrons. X-ray lasers. E-beam machines. But those approaches all fizzled out. So what ought to be a physics experiment run occasionally was hammered into being a production technology. Now I'm imaging some retro-50s (ala Fallout) setting where the fancy chipmaking machines use bomb-pumped x-ray lasers. Swords into ploughshares taken too far? Maybe, but who cares!
  - dist-epoch 3y ago
    > bomb-pumped x-ray lasers For this to make sense you would need to expose multiple wafers on each detonation. But then you would need one mask per wafer, and masks are even harder to make than a chip (electron beam, ...)
- exmadscientist 3y ago
  Does anyone know why synchrotron light sources didn't/don't work out for EUV generation? Certainly they seem affordable at fab scale (which is mind-blowing in and of itself) so there must be some other reason.
  - Animats 3y ago
    Not sure. As an experiment, part of the Stanford Linear Accelerator was used to expose some wafers. It worked. Design paper from China on a synchrotron ring for EUV.[1] Note lack of info about ring dimensions. But it looks like hundreds of meters, at least. I think it's been tried with a large research synchrotron ring. But for now, apparently building a synchrotron is even more expensive than those AMSL nightmares. Any news on progress from the VCs? If someone can make this work cost-effectively it will be very profitable. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07323-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07323-z
    - techdragon 3y ago
      That’s it in a nutshell. The current cost of a Synchrotron is more then the cost of the equivalent capability using non-synchrotron technologies. It might seem crazy but it turns out Synchrotrons are pretty rare machines too… and they are less “operationalised” in an industrial sense than the crazy tech inside the EUV machines… between the vacuum levels needed and the various linear or circular accelerator technologies available, at the end of the day it’s just way more of a pain in the ass to maintain a large industrially pure vacuum machine operating at continuous round the clock fashion. which might seem nuts but talk to anyone who’s works with high vacuum systems about vacuum purity, out gassing and contamination and yeah… it will make sense pretty quickly.
SkyPuncher 3y ago
If feels a lot like hitting a sniper shot at insane ranges. You can know all of the theory, but actually doing it is a different ballgame

by crote 3y ago

SoKamil 3y ago

We are now two layers deep into the secret sauce. I want to know what the secret sauce of the measurement and calibration equipment is!

bloggie 3y ago
Hi, I work in laser measurement and calibration. There is no secret sauce; you take a physical phenomenon that translates optical power or energy into an electrical signal, measure that signal, then find the sensitivity value of that phenomenon and account for any other effects such as ambient temperature, fill factor, linearity, parasitics etc. and then prove that your calculations are correct by comparing them with NIST/PTB.

Animats 3y ago

> The technology behind EUV is quite simple on paper, the hard part is getting it to work reliably. EUV machines are a terrible approach to the problem made to work through a huge amount of effort. Look at the size of those things. All to get a little burst of soft X-rays and focus it on a mask and wafer. With a light source that works by using lasers to vaporize a droplet of tin falling in vacuum. Creating an internal mess that has to be cleaned up. For a decade, people in wafer fab hoped there would be some other way to do this. Small synchrotrons. X-ray lasers. E-beam machines. But those approaches all fizzled out. So what ought to be a physics experiment run occasionally was hammered into being a production technology. Examples of a commercial technology that hard which went mainstream are rare. There was the image orthicon.[1] That's a TV camera tube. Previous technologies needed very bright light. Zworklin's iconoscope accumulated the image over an entire frame time, but photon to electron conversion was very inefficient. Farnsworth's image dissector had much more efficient photon to electron conversion, because it had a photomultiplier built into the tube, but only the light received from the pixel currently under the scanning beam contributed to the output - there was no full-frame accumulation. So RCA developed the image orthicon, which combined both of those technologies. It was insanely complicated and expensive. The tube alone cost about US$10,000 in the 1950. Color required three tubes. The tubes required something like ten different power supplies, and control and alignment required hundreds of adjustments. Here's someone trying to restore one.[2] All those racks of equipment for one camera. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Image_orthicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Image_orthic... [2] http://earlytelevision.org/rca_tk41_restoration.html http://earlytelevision.org/rca_tk41_restoration.html

Arrath 3y ago
> For a decade, people in wafer fab hoped there would be some other way to do this. Small synchrotrons. X-ray lasers. E-beam machines. But those approaches all fizzled out. So what ought to be a physics experiment run occasionally was hammered into being a production technology. Now I'm imaging some retro-50s (ala Fallout) setting where the fancy chipmaking machines use bomb-pumped x-ray lasers. Swords into ploughshares taken too far? Maybe, but who cares!
- dist-epoch 3y ago
  > bomb-pumped x-ray lasers For this to make sense you would need to expose multiple wafers on each detonation. But then you would need one mask per wafer, and masks are even harder to make than a chip (electron beam, ...)
exmadscientist 3y ago
Does anyone know why synchrotron light sources didn't/don't work out for EUV generation? Certainly they seem affordable at fab scale (which is mind-blowing in and of itself) so there must be some other reason.
- Animats 3y ago
  Not sure. As an experiment, part of the Stanford Linear Accelerator was used to expose some wafers. It worked. Design paper from China on a synchrotron ring for EUV.[1] Note lack of info about ring dimensions. But it looks like hundreds of meters, at least. I think it's been tried with a large research synchrotron ring. But for now, apparently building a synchrotron is even more expensive than those AMSL nightmares. Any news on progress from the VCs? If someone can make this work cost-effectively it will be very profitable. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07323-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07323-z
  - techdragon 3y ago
    That’s it in a nutshell. The current cost of a Synchrotron is more then the cost of the equivalent capability using non-synchrotron technologies. It might seem crazy but it turns out Synchrotrons are pretty rare machines too… and they are less “operationalised” in an industrial sense than the crazy tech inside the EUV machines… between the vacuum levels needed and the various linear or circular accelerator technologies available, at the end of the day it’s just way more of a pain in the ass to maintain a large industrially pure vacuum machine operating at continuous round the clock fashion. which might seem nuts but talk to anyone who’s works with high vacuum systems about vacuum purity, out gassing and contamination and yeah… it will make sense pretty quickly.

SkyPuncher 3y ago

If feels a lot like hitting a sniper shot at insane ranges. You can know all of the theory, but actually doing it is a different ballgame