The reliable sources for high-power EUV light (synchotrons and free-electron lasers) are all expensive and gigantic (building sized) due to the accelerator and

The reliable sources for high-power EUV light (synchotrons and free-electron lasers) are all expensive and gigantic (building sized) due to the accelerator and shielding required for the electron beam. They're completely impractical for industrial scale manufacture (you fundamentally couldn't put 100 of them into a single factory). Heating tin in a regular laser until it forms plasma and starts emitting 13.5 nm light is much simpler to scale down (since it doesn't involve an accelerated electron beam) but you lose large amounts of power while trying to form a partially coherent beam out of the result, turning hundreds of kilowatts of infra-red laser power into mere 10's of watts of EUV power. The high input to output ratio means that you need to be really careful that the large amount of dissipated power doesn't cause problems. Tiny misalignment problems often result in the 200kW infra-red input laser melting the entire device into a puddle of former components. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1321162&page_number=2 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1321162&page_numb...