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ASML unveils EUV light source advance that could yield 50% more chips by 2030
- throw0101a 7mo agoSo how small are individual components (e.g., transistors) nowadays? Presumably there's a lower limit: once you're a few atoms across, it seems that you can't go any smaller (?).
- whazor 7mo agoThis is about increasing output per machine via upgrades.
- ranger_danger 7mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process
- hinkley 7mo agoI still think we should have gone with average gates per square mm as a new yardstick. It would also make sense to the Numbers Go Up people.
- itopaloglu83 7mo agoIt’s going to be quite funny if they can go below 40nm in gate pitch size, because they’ll need to call it 0nm.
- ahazred8ta 7mo agoGates are about 30-50 nm wide, even though they're called '3nm' for marketing reasons.
- phkahler 7mo agoMetal pitch is 26nm. That means parallel wires can be placed 2 wavelengths apart with 13.5nm light.
- penguin_booze 7mo agoLike free range chicken.
- kakacik 7mo agoYou only need to live in reasonable place for that phrase to have a proper meaning, across whole market from cheapest to most expensive.
- denkmoon 7mo agoWhat is 'proper meaning'? Only a single brand of egg in my supermarket is genuinely free range per the definition supplied by our agricultural scientists (CSIRO, Australia) - less than 1500 hens per hectare. "Free range" can mean anything up to 10,000 hens per hectare.
- PearlRiver 7mo agohttps://beterleven.dierenbescherming.nl/ https://beterleven.dierenbescherming.nl/ They have a code in my country that is pretty simple from 1 to 3. The highest tier is 11 chickens per square meter apparently (I do not eat poultry myself).
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- blinding-streak 7mo agoAs The Register used to call it, these clean-sounding process nodes (15nm, 5nm, 3nm etc) are "marchitecture." Marketing architecture. Reality is much messier.
- cyptus 7mo agosome gates are only 10-14 nm wide, thats about 50 silicon atoms!
- et1337 7mo agoThis video is a really cool dive into EUV for the uninitiated (me) https://youtu.be/MiUHjLxm3V0?si=kEPSicC2WXYhcQ6L https://youtu.be/MiUHjLxm3V0?si=kEPSicC2WXYhcQ6L
- hinkley 7mo agoThe whole “exploding tiny drops of metal” in the middle of this is just Loony Toons. This machine is literally insane and two of the companies I am long-long on would be completely fucked without it.
- patmorgan23 7mo agoYou forgot WITH LASERS, and IN A VACUUM
- m4rtink 7mo agoIIRC from the Veritasium video[0] there is actually some hydrogen gas flowing at quite a high speed though the laser chamber to carry away the tin debris so that it does not accumulate on the mirrors. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0
- greggsy 7mo agoThey account to every single tiny atom somehow too, but I think I fell asleep last time I watched the video.
- leoc 7mo agoThe old SemiAccurate article https://semiaccurate.com/2013/02/13/euv-moves-forward-two-steps-back-one/ https://semiaccurate.com/2013/02/13/euv-moves-forward-two-st... was very funny.
- atonse 7mo agoYes it was crazy when I first heard about it "wait what? they shoot it in mid-air?" and that was before I found out they did that like 30k times a second. But now 100k times a second apparently. Humans are amazing.
- on_the_train 7mo agoThis is a steep increase of power to get out of a vacuum system that is highly sensitive to temperature changes.
- pixelsub 7mo ago[flagged]
- onjectic 7mo ago> SAN DIEGO, California > to help retain the Dutch company's edge over emerging U.S. and Chinese rivals Great news, but what a strange attempt to equate the U.S. and China in this and build a narrative. Cymer was founded in San Diego.
- petcat 7mo agoYeah it's an interesting angle in the article. The EUV light source technology is completely designed, developed, and manufactured by Cymer in California, which is a US company that ASML acquired in 2013. If export control agreements were not in place then ASML would have never been permitted to acquire Cymer. And if they are not enforced then the US would almost certainly require ASML to sell Cymer back to US ownership, TikTok-style. The reality is that it's American technology that is used in ASML machines so I don't know why the article tries to frame it like it's a competition.
- ahartmetz 7mo agoWhich American rival would that be anyway? I have not heard of any.
- petcat 7mo agoxLight is the promising new US competitor to Cymer. Lots of funding from the US CHIPS And Science Act. Founded by Dept. of Energy engineers who formerly worked on large-scale X-Ray systems and particle accelerators.
- ahartmetz 7mo agoOh, alright. I was thinking of full lithography machines.
- merb 7mo agoYour take is also a bad one. No what asml builds is not American technology. Why asml succeeded is because they got tons of company’s and people to help them advance the technology of the chip industry. Yes it wouldn’t be possible without the Americans. But it would also not be possible without the Europeans, the Koreans, etc… what asml did was basically ask the technology leaders in each field to build their best product so that they can take their parts and assembly this awesome piece of technology.
- xnx 7mo ago> The company's researchers have found a way to boost the power of the EUV light source to 1,000 watts from 600 watts now. > "We see a reasonably clear path toward 1,500 watts, and no fundamental reason why we couldn't get to 2,000 watts."
- tromp 7mo agoThe light power increase is even more impressive at 67%: > The company's researchers have found a way to boost the power of the EUV light source to 1,000 watts from 600 watts now. with more on the horizon: > We see a reasonably clear path toward 1,500 watts, and no fundamental reason why we couldn't get to 2,000 watts.
- exabrial 7mo agoWhy this is a big deal: Right now the only way to make "bright" EUV (100-200 watts) is to spray fine drops of a metal in a stream, then target and blast each drop with a laser. pretty wild way to make light.
- TheJoeMan 7mo agoAnd they’re now going to hit each drop three! times instead of two, and increase to 100,000 drops per second. Very hard to imagine.
- ufmace 7mo agoIf you wrote a science fiction novel around the idea that we make computing devices by blasting fine drops of tin in a vacuum with a laser exactly 3 times at exactly 100,000 drops per second, nobody would believe it. Truth is crazier than fiction.
- mptest 7mo agoWhat's even crazier is the technological pursuit of EUV and what a moonshot it was. Chip wars by chris miller chronicles it and it is absolutely crazier than sci fi.
- mschuster91 7mo agoEnd result: the AI industry will get 50% more chips, the rest of us plebs will still be waiting for new GPUs to hit the market... It's impressive to see that there still was so much room left to improve EUV, but I can't help but be royally pissed off that it will be a looooong time before we the people see any practical benefit of it.
- adrian_b 7mo agoYes, and these days both AMD and Intel have announced that their next generation of desktop CPUs, Zen 6 and Nova Lake, which are expected to have very significant improvements over the current CPUs (including much more cores for both and AVX-512 for Intel), have been postponed for next year, instead of being launched this year, as originally planned. This delay is presumably caused by both the lack of production capacity at TSMC, which is busy with AI, and by the fear that any launch of a new CPU would be crippled by the impossibility to buy DRAM and SSDs for new computers.
- mschuster91 7mo agoIt's high time for governments to step in and do some Soviet style regulation. This AI shit is getting out of hand, it's not healthy for any economy when one group of actors has so much money that they can buy out entire classes of Things that are vital for any society to be at least somewhat affordable and widespread.
- pjmlp 7mo agoAnd what hard drives and memory slots would those chips be able to use?
- KellyCriterion 7mo agoThere is an excellent video from German CCC on how chips are produced from their last convention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdppYYfQJgg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdppYYfQJgg I can highly recommend this to everybody who is "somehow in tech or IT"