4 ms·
So did the year of the EUV lithography happen? What year was it? (Genuinely asking, I don't know anything about chips - I'm the kind of programmer who is profo
by mrsilencedogood 2y ago
So did the year of the EUV lithography happen? What year was it?
(Genuinely asking, I don't know anything about chips - I'm the kind of programmer who is profoundly comforted by pretending like my CPU is like a really fast version of the thing I did in CompE 201, as opposed to reality which i gather is a bit more like a demonically possessed stone that glues together a bunch of barely understood physics that kind of "even out" at macro levels but seem pretty f'd up at quantum levels).
- scrlk 2y ago2019, when TSMC N7+ entered high volume manufacturing.
- SSLy 2y agoOK, and in Intel's fabs? They're still not on EUV, right?
- scrlk 2y agoIntel 4 was their first EUV process, which entered HVM in September 2023.
- throwaway81523 2y agoDoes doing an EUV chip when you already have tons of non-EUV fab take more technical wizardry than writing a huge check to ASML for the EUV machine? EUV is in the mask making step, right? Obviously your wafer fab has to be tuned to your masks but EUV lithography itself (i.e. ASML making the machine) is waaay more difficult from what I can tell.
- sroussey 2y agoYes and no. More difficult in that it is different and smaller and there are issues to work out every time that happens (I once worked in a fab changing nodes). But some things are easier downstream, skipping the multi-patterning business for example. Though that multi-patterning stuff was pretty smart!
- baoluofu 2y agoYour description of reality made me chuckle. I remember during my degree the professor teaching us about how simple CPUs are made, but saying that the people who engineer the current hardware are like dark magicians. It can only have gotten more complicated since then.