The 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.
Yes 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.
You have a machine that’s basically a clean room inside and one of the parts is essentially electrosputtering tin but then throwing all the tin away and using the EM pulse from the sputter to do work.
Oh and can you build it so it can run hundreds or thousands of hours before being cleaned? Thanks byyyyyyyyeeeeee!
I thought this video was a lot better than the Veritasium video. The Veritasium video was awkward. I think they tried to follow the formula from the (excellent) blue led video that performed so well, but it just didn't work.
The thing I didn't understand after watching that video was why you need such an exotic solution to produce EUV light. We can make lights no problem in the visible spectrum, we can make xray machines easily enough that every doctors office can afford one, what is it specifically about those wavelengths that are so tricky.
The issue isn't in generating short wavelength light, it's in focusing it accurately enough to print a pattern with trillions of nanoscale features with few defects. We can't really use lenses since every material we could use is opaque to high energy photons so we need to use mirrors, which still absorb a lot of the light energy hitting them. Now this only explains why we need all the crazy stuff that asml puts in it's EUV machines to use near x-ray light, but not why they don't use x-ray or higher energy photons. I believe the answer to this is just that the mirrors they can use for EUV are unacceptably bad for anything higher, but I'm not sure
As I understand it, primarly because due to the high energy level of x-rays, light x-ray interacts very differently with materials[1]. Primarily they get absorbed, so very difficult to make mirrors or lenses, which are crucial for litography to redirect and focus the light on a specific miniscule point on the wafer.
The primary method is to rely grazing angle reflection, but that per definition only allows you a tiny deflection at a time, nothing like a parabolic mirror or whatnot.
All of these problems or equivalent still exist in EUV. Litho industry had to kind of rethink the source and scanner because it went from all lenses to all mirrors in EUV. This is also why low NA and high NA EUV scanners were different phases.
As I hear it, the decision had large economic component related to Masks and even OPC.
It really is the specific wavelength. Higher or lower is easier. But euv has tricky properties which make it feasible for Lithography (although just barely it you have a look at the optics) but hard to produce with high intensities.
Specifically, what makes x-rays easy to generate are these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristic_X-ray In essence, smashing electrons into atoms allows you to ionize the inner shell of an atom and when an electron drops down from an outer shell, the excess energy is shed as high-energy photons. This constrains the energy range of X-ray tubes ("smash electron into metal") to wavelengths well below 13.5nm.
(These emission lines are also what is being used in x-ray spectroscopy to identify elements)
> The key advancements in Monday's disclosure involved doubling the number of tin drops to about 100,000 every second, and shaping them into plasma using two smaller laser bursts, as opposed to today's machines that use a single shaping burst.
This is covered in that video. Did they let him leak their Q1 plans?
That has been covered before in other videos[0] that this is their roadmap to higher power, so I'm also not sure what they have announced now that wasn't previously announced.
So 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 (?).
Yeah 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.
There is much more in an ASML machine, besides the UV source.
So the ASML machines combine technologies developed in various places, not only in USA, even if the UV source is indeed a critical component. While an ASML machine would not work without the UV source, it would also not work without many other critical optical and mechanical components.
If it were so easy to make a lithography machine when you have a UV source, Cymer would have remained an independent company or it would have been bought by a US company. Cymer has been bought by their only customer.
The same happens when you look at a PC, it is likely that it contains something essential that comes from USA, i.e. the CPU logic may be designed by AMD, but the manufacturing technology is designed in Taiwan, the memories may be designed and made in Korea, other chips may be designed and made in Taiwan, other components come from Japan, the PCB may have been designed in Taiwan, but actually made in China, and so on.
So yes, it has some important US technology in it, but there is a very long way from a CPU logic design to a physical computer and most of that rarely has anything to do with USA.
Your 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.
xLight 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.
This video is a really cool dive into EUV for the uninitiated (me) https://youtu.be/MiUHjLxm3V0?si=kEPSicC2WXYhcQ6L
The 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.
You forgot WITH LASERS, and IN A VACUUM
Yes 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.
You have a machine that’s basically a clean room inside and one of the parts is essentially electrosputtering tin but then throwing all the tin away and using the EM pulse from the sputter to do work.
Oh and can you build it so it can run hundreds or thousands of hours before being cleaned? Thanks byyyyyyyyeeeeee!
The inside of those machines are far, far cleaner than the inside of any clean room ever entered by a human. They have to be molecularly clean.
Which isn't easy considering they explode tin droplets in the machine. I think that's the point the other commenter wanted to make.
Think about the purity requirements that places on the tin.
> We are going to spray expensive stuff in an extremely fine and precise line. Then we're going to shoot a laser at each droplet.
< Why?!
> To make a better laser.
< Yes, of course you are.
> 100,000 times per second.
< [AFK, buying shares.]
Don't forget that they are hitting each droplet 3 times.
I have shares in one of their biggest customers, and one of their customer’s biggest customers.
We are quickly leaving the realm of dependent variables still looking anything like diversification.
> We are quickly leaving the realm of dependent variables still looking anything like diversification.
What does that mean?
Asianometry has half a dozen or so videos of you want some really deep dives on the tech and industry (with sources, since we’re on HN)
Or this video, which came out before Veritasium's
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2482h_TNwg
https://youtu.be/NGFhc8R_uO4
Or this presentation which came out way long ago.
This is worth the (re)watch every time it comes up.
I thought this video was a lot better than the Veritasium video. The Veritasium video was awkward. I think they tried to follow the formula from the (excellent) blue led video that performed so well, but it just didn't work.
The thing I didn't understand after watching that video was why you need such an exotic solution to produce EUV light. We can make lights no problem in the visible spectrum, we can make xray machines easily enough that every doctors office can afford one, what is it specifically about those wavelengths that are so tricky.
The issue isn't in generating short wavelength light, it's in focusing it accurately enough to print a pattern with trillions of nanoscale features with few defects. We can't really use lenses since every material we could use is opaque to high energy photons so we need to use mirrors, which still absorb a lot of the light energy hitting them. Now this only explains why we need all the crazy stuff that asml puts in it's EUV machines to use near x-ray light, but not why they don't use x-ray or higher energy photons. I believe the answer to this is just that the mirrors they can use for EUV are unacceptably bad for anything higher, but I'm not sure
There is such a thing as X-ray lithography, but it comes with significant challenges that make it not really worth it compared to EUV.
I'd like to hear more about these challenges
As I understand it, primarly because due to the high energy level of x-rays, light x-ray interacts very differently with materials[1]. Primarily they get absorbed, so very difficult to make mirrors or lenses, which are crucial for litography to redirect and focus the light on a specific miniscule point on the wafer.
The primary method is to rely grazing angle reflection, but that per definition only allows you a tiny deflection at a time, nothing like a parabolic mirror or whatnot.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_optics
All of these problems or equivalent still exist in EUV. Litho industry had to kind of rethink the source and scanner because it went from all lenses to all mirrors in EUV. This is also why low NA and high NA EUV scanners were different phases.
As I hear it, the decision had large economic component related to Masks and even OPC.
It really is the specific wavelength. Higher or lower is easier. But euv has tricky properties which make it feasible for Lithography (although just barely it you have a look at the optics) but hard to produce with high intensities.
Specifically, what makes x-rays easy to generate are these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristic_X-ray In essence, smashing electrons into atoms allows you to ionize the inner shell of an atom and when an electron drops down from an outer shell, the excess energy is shed as high-energy photons. This constrains the energy range of X-ray tubes ("smash electron into metal") to wavelengths well below 13.5nm.
(These emission lines are also what is being used in x-ray spectroscopy to identify elements)
You can also generate broad spectrum bremsstrahlung radiation easily, this is widely used for medical X-rays.
Any source to this? I am hearing this for the first time.
ITs easy to make X-rays, you just hit a metal target with electrons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_tube
Here's your link without the surveillance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0
With slightly less surveillance
try duck player
Okay this is weird.
> The key advancements in Monday's disclosure involved doubling the number of tin drops to about 100,000 every second, and shaping them into plasma using two smaller laser bursts, as opposed to today's machines that use a single shaping burst.
This is covered in that video. Did they let him leak their Q1 plans?
That has been covered before in other videos[0] that this is their roadmap to higher power, so I'm also not sure what they have announced now that wasn't previously announced.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXnrzS3aGeM
> 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."
The 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.
So 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 (?).
Gates are about 30-50 nm wide, even though they're called '3nm' for marketing reasons.
Metal pitch is 26nm. That means parallel wires can be placed 2 wavelengths apart with 13.5nm light.
Like free range chicken.
You only need to live in reasonable place for that phrase to have a proper meaning, across whole market from cheapest to most expensive.
This is about increasing output per machine via upgrades.
some gates are only 10-14 nm wide, thats about 50 silicon atoms!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process
I 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.
It’s going to be quite funny if they can go below 40nm in gate pitch size, because they’ll need to call it 0nm.
They are moving to angstroms, hence 18A for example.
> 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.
Yeah 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.
There is much more in an ASML machine, besides the UV source.
So the ASML machines combine technologies developed in various places, not only in USA, even if the UV source is indeed a critical component. While an ASML machine would not work without the UV source, it would also not work without many other critical optical and mechanical components.
If it were so easy to make a lithography machine when you have a UV source, Cymer would have remained an independent company or it would have been bought by a US company. Cymer has been bought by their only customer.
The same happens when you look at a PC, it is likely that it contains something essential that comes from USA, i.e. the CPU logic may be designed by AMD, but the manufacturing technology is designed in Taiwan, the memories may be designed and made in Korea, other chips may be designed and made in Taiwan, other components come from Japan, the PCB may have been designed in Taiwan, but actually made in China, and so on.
So yes, it has some important US technology in it, but there is a very long way from a CPU logic design to a physical computer and most of that rarely has anything to do with USA.
The same happens with an ASML machine.
Your 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.
Which American rival would that be anyway? I have not heard of any.
xLight 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.
Oh, alright. I was thinking of full lithography machines.
I think the Japanese are also working on potentially competing technology
This is a steep increase of power to get out of a vacuum system that is highly sensitive to temperature changes.