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Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator
- jdaw0 2y agohttps://archive.ph/O9f3E https://archive.ph/O9f3E
- n0n0n4t0r 2y agoSo they basically want to use synchrotron?
- PaulHoule 2y agoHooked up to a free electron laser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-electron_laser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-electron_laser or some similar kind of device that turns the momentum of electrons into light. I'm a little surprised that they didn't try something like a FEL first instead of that terribly problematic device that uses highly inefficient lasers to blow up tin droplets, itself a high-loss process that produces contamination and resulted in years of delay developing materials for https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories/2022/the-euv-pellicle-indistinguishable-from-magic https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories/2022/the-euv-pellicle-i...
- monocasa 2y agoThey tried both in the initial design phase, there's upsides and downsides, but ultimately thought that the tin droplet laser was more liekly to actually get done more or less on the time schedule requested, and so that's where the bulk of the capital went. Interestingly China has been continuing working on the synchotron based EUV litho idea (in addition to work to create domestically built tin laser EUV lithos machines). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07323-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07323-z
- spudnik 2y ago[dead]
- itishappy 2y agoLove me some FELs. Pretty sure they did try this, but determined it to be too large and costly for the technology of the time. https://www.asianometry.com/p/euv-lithography-but-with-a-free-electron https://www.asianometry.com/p/euv-lithography-but-with-a-fre... https://www.euvlitho.com/2017/P18.pdf https://www.euvlitho.com/2017/P18.pdf
- phkahler 2y agoMy bet is on plasma Wakefield accelerators to feed the FEL. But yeah a synchrotron might do as an intermediate step. Free Electron Lasers can be tuned to different wavelengths all the way to x-rays.
- sroussey 2y agoI was hoping to see table top particle accelerators like those at UCLA were progressing into something usable for lithography. Which makes me wonder, why not use electrons instead of light?
- thmsths 2y agoFrom my non expert understanding, we already do kinda. The masks used for photolithography are made using an electron beam, allowing for a much greater resolution than what the underlying photolithography allows. But this is far too slow for large scale production. Scanning an electron beam, repeatedly over an entire waffer would take forever. So instead we do it once, to make the mask, and that mask is then used over and over to expose the waffer. This is a bit little injection molding: the mold is very expensive and made with a far better manufacturing process than the plastic pieces that it will eventually produce, but this is the price to pay for high volumes and low costs.
- stanleykm 2y agoAdding to this, from what I’ve read electron beam is too slow for the required throughput. The ASML EUV machine can etch something like 170 wafers per hour. Using an electron beam would be far too slow for 2-3 wafers per minute.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agoIt would be interesting to see if this tech was viable for dev boards. i.e. when you want to design a new 2nm chip, what if you were using electron beam chips to test out designs?
- monocasa 2y agoThat would almost certainly be more expensive. When people talk about modern masks being $15M or so for each mask set, a huge fraction of the cost is this process for the masks. It also doesn't tell you as much about how your design actually runs on the process in question.
- spudnik 2y ago[flagged]
- kev009 2y agoIs the idea that this will scale? You can already build down to the atomic level with scanning tunneling microscopy (thanks IBM).
- itishappy 2y agoYes, electron-beam lithography is fantastic but also fantastically slow. Sorta like building a Lego model brick by brick vs layer by layer. It's still used for reticle fabrication and repair. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-beam_lithography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-beam_lithography Edit: Confused SEMs and STMs, but the principle described above applies to both.
- sevensor 2y agoWhere the reticle is worth patterning expensively because it gets used in so many subsequent exposures using light rather than electrons.
- adastra22 2y agoNo, we cannot. IBM moved neutral atoms around on an inert surface. No one has demonstrated building covalent structures (or metallic, or ionic for that matter). My startup is trying to do this, and it is a fiendishly hard problem.
- fooker 2y agoWhy though?
- lightedman 2y agoThings don't like to move once they're atomically-stuck together. Getting them to stick is another issue altogether. Doing so in reliable locations repeatedly at scale? Good luck.
- adastra22 2y agoWhy is it hard? You need to be able to position things with sub-angstrom precision from a platform that has ~nm uncertainty in the critical z positioning, and in the case of nc-AFM is oscillating to boot. And you can’t use existing tools. You need an atomically precise scanning probe tip with very specific reactive chemical structure, but NOT react with the surface while scanning with a voltage bias. And where do you source feedstock from? Needs to be delivered to the surface in passive form but be activated when needed to switch to being chemically reactive in a specific way to get it on the transfer tool and then onto the part being built. Oh, and this is without even getting into how many electronic structures are entirely invisible at certain voltages, everything looks like an identical blobish shape, surfaces are reconfiguring themselves constantly, and probes randomly crash due to piezo creep, destroying days or weeks of work. My startup has solutions to all of these problems. And the payoff at the end is reliable, scalable quantum computers, followed by full-on Drexlarian nanotech. But yeah, it’s a fiendishly hard problem.
- JimBlackwood 2y agoFunny, we asked why they didn’t use a cyclotron during an ASML visit Things would get a bit radioactive at those energies, though.
- russellbeattie 2y agoLead is cheap, right? Very cool you visited ASML. Anything exciting/interesting you'd be willing to tell the class?
- JimBlackwood 2y agoHah, I think there’s two things that stand out in my memory. - They need 3 Boeing 737’s to ship an EUV machine. - We talked with one guy who’s responsibility it was to design one of the calibration points the machine uses to find it’s zero position. This left me amazed that they’re able to ship a machine halfway across the world, re-assemble it and calibrate it again to such accuracy. And! On top of that, make it reproducible over different machines!
- russellbeattie 2y agoOh, I've actually seen that in videos! If you Google it, there's tons of pics showing the loading/unloading. They're not one-offs either. TSMC may order 80 at a time. Hadn't thought about calibration afterwards. Crazy.
- DevelopingElk 2y agoFree Electron Lasers have potential to generate more tunable radiation with higher luminosity. Despite this they aren't a drop in replacement for the current EUV light sources. A free electron laser is 200 meters long, so a single laser would feed multiple EUV machines for it to be economical. This technology is very promising but it has been under development for a while. Does anyone know what the current difficulties are?
- muhdeeb 2y agoAs far as I understand it, smaller scale XFEL devices still suffer from poor aim, even though now these machines have been miniaturized to basement scales. They don’t need to be significant fractions of a kilometer anymore. This aim issue will probably be solved in the next few years. It’s an exciting time to be in X ray science, particularly anything ultrafast.
- ur-whale 2y agohttps://archive.is/HKDho https://archive.is/HKDho
- hengheng 2y agoEUV has always been about achieving high enough power to be economically viable. It was never about making chips at any cost. I remember reading the tinfoil hat theory about three-letter agencies making low-quantity high-cost chips at incredible process sizes in order to break encryption. I doubt that's still as viable today as it was before leakage currents started dominating, but it was an impressively plausible theory.
- christkv 2y agoWhere is my superconductor based CPUs preferably at room temperature.
- nick3443 2y agoDoes a superconducting semiconductor even make sense philosophically?
- throwaway81523 2y agoIt's a superconducting switch, not a semiconductor per se. Lookup "Josephson junction". IBM spent a fortune on a huge R&D program to make computers from this, but eventually abandoned it. I think they got some circuitry working but eventually decided it wasn't practical enough to commercialize. Also, some of today's work in quantum computers uses superconducting qubits. Maybe that's in the same research stage now. No idea if it will ever become practical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_effect
- _carbyau_ 2y agoHell, even liquid nitrogen temperatures are fine. More hassle than you'd want in your pocket but yearly running costs wouldn't be too bad for most businesses.
- artemonster 2y agothat tinfoil hat theory, just as basically all of them, can only be produced by people that have absolutely zero understanding of the topic. The amount of challenges that industry has faced during the relatively fast progress through nodes is just non skippable, as there were so many things to be discovered through very expensive and long brute force (just one example: high k dielectrics)
- mgnn 2y agoThis article from half a year ago has photos and diagrams https://spectrum.ieee.org/euv-fel https://spectrum.ieee.org/euv-fel
- sevensor 2y agoHeadline stuck me funny; I was working in ion implantation 20 years ago. Of course they’re talking about lithography, because those guys are the fighter pilots / first violinists of semiconductor manufacturing, they get all the attention.
- avs733 2y agoThis is such a good analogy. Implant and thin film deposition never gets any respect…
- sevensor 2y agoSeriously! Although I’d say the most undervalued is wet processing. It’s incredible how much art and science go into not leaving water spots. Not to mention cleaning up other people’s messes.
- anfilt 2y agoDirect-write lithography has been a thing for a long time such as EBL. It's just SLOW. So it's only really viable for devices that are made in low quantities, simple devices or research.
- gorkish 2y agoIf you want to make features tinier than EUV allows, you do what you have done for the last few decades and make them directly, but real slow and costly, with electron beams. IMO at some point it seems likely that someone will simply decide to brute force e beam litho up to mass production rates.