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EUV 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 ha

EUV 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 ago
Where is my superconductor based CPUs preferably at room temperature.
- nick3443 2y ago
  Does a superconducting semiconductor even make sense philosophically?
  - throwaway81523 2y ago
    It'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 ago
  Hell, 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 ago
that 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)
- fooker 2y ago
  No, you can absolutely make specialized chips that are orders of magnitude better than the commercial state of the art if you don't care about mass production or operational costs. I can bet there are superconductor/photonics/topologically different/strange memory/smaller process size prototypes around. Right now we are getting to the limits of transistor sizes, but even a couple of years ago experimental prototypes of smaller process size were developed years before mass production.
  - artemonster 2y ago
    where you get this nonsense? I am from semicon industry, so please, sources for the claim "orders of magnitude better"
    - fooker 2y ago
      Look at the history of 5nm process for example, from the first prototypes to mass production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process
  - LeifCarrotson 2y ago
    Well sure, at many orders of magnitude more cost. If you wanted to brute-force RSA, you'd be better off leveraging economies of scale to operate ten thousand current-gen 4nm GPUs running at 2 GHz with air coolers than a single exotic prototype 1nm ASIC running at 8 GHz with cryogenic cooling. Aside from LCS35, most cryptographic problems are about as easy with two processors that are half as fast as one processor that costs twice as much.
smallmancontrov 2y ago
Back in the day, HP advertised that the distributed amplifiers in their 26.5 and 50 GHz equipment were made with e-beams, but the process size wasn't anything special, certainly not by today's standards. I'm not really sure what drove the decision.
maxglute 2y ago
>economically viable IIRC EUV development picked plasma over synchrotron because plasma projected to be cheaper, even though technically synchrotron had more benefits. Queue many, many years of solving for technical challenges for LPP and now commercialized EUV machines cost 200m, 400m for next high NA. Which is about the cost of multiple small or single medium size synchrotron facility. It's amazing plasma EUV works, but it's also a failure in the sense that it is FAR less economical than originally envisioned, which explains why particle accelerator route is still being worked on.

christkv 2y ago

Where is my superconductor based CPUs preferably at room temperature.

nick3443 2y ago
Does a superconducting semiconductor even make sense philosophically?
- throwaway81523 2y ago
  It'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 ago
Hell, 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 ago

that 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)

fooker 2y ago
No, you can absolutely make specialized chips that are orders of magnitude better than the commercial state of the art if you don't care about mass production or operational costs. I can bet there are superconductor/photonics/topologically different/strange memory/smaller process size prototypes around. Right now we are getting to the limits of transistor sizes, but even a couple of years ago experimental prototypes of smaller process size were developed years before mass production.
- artemonster 2y ago
  where you get this nonsense? I am from semicon industry, so please, sources for the claim "orders of magnitude better"
  - fooker 2y ago
    Look at the history of 5nm process for example, from the first prototypes to mass production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process
- LeifCarrotson 2y ago
  Well sure, at many orders of magnitude more cost. If you wanted to brute-force RSA, you'd be better off leveraging economies of scale to operate ten thousand current-gen 4nm GPUs running at 2 GHz with air coolers than a single exotic prototype 1nm ASIC running at 8 GHz with cryogenic cooling. Aside from LCS35, most cryptographic problems are about as easy with two processors that are half as fast as one processor that costs twice as much.

smallmancontrov 2y ago

Back in the day, HP advertised that the distributed amplifiers in their 26.5 and 50 GHz equipment were made with e-beams, but the process size wasn't anything special, certainly not by today's standards. I'm not really sure what drove the decision.

maxglute 2y ago

>economically viable IIRC EUV development picked plasma over synchrotron because plasma projected to be cheaper, even though technically synchrotron had more benefits. Queue many, many years of solving for technical challenges for LPP and now commercialized EUV machines cost 200m, 400m for next high NA. Which is about the cost of multiple small or single medium size synchrotron facility. It's amazing plasma EUV works, but it's also a failure in the sense that it is FAR less economical than originally envisioned, which explains why particle accelerator route is still being worked on.