Tiny Japan Firm Helps to Crack Code for Next-Gen Computer Chips (bloomberg.com) 25
Chipmakers have spent two decades pouring investment into a revolutionary new technique to push the limits of physics and cram more transistors onto slices of silicon. Now that technology is on the cusp of going mainstream, thanks to a secretive Japanese company that's mastered the skill of manipulating light for applications from squid fishing to cinema projection. From a report: Ushio announced July it had cleared a key milestone, perfecting the powerful, ultra-precise lights needed to test chip designs based on extreme ultraviolet lithography or EUV, the process through which the next generation of semiconductors will be made. With that, the Japanese company became a major player in future chipmaking. "The infrastructure is now mostly ready," Chief Executive Officer Koji Naito said in an interview. "Testing equipment was one of the things holding back EUV. With that piece in place, production efficiency and yields can go up." Ushio's advances cement its position among a coterie of little-known Japanese companies indispensable to the production of the world's consumer electronics. The Tokyo-based company developed a light source for equipment used to test what are known as masks: glass squares slightly bigger than a CD case that act as a stencil for chip designs. These templates have to be absolutely perfect, as even a tiny defect in one of them can render every chip in a large batch unusable.
tiny firm (Score:3, Funny)
Re:tiny firm (Score:4, Informative)
Also "Japan firm"? Surely "Japanese firm".
Re: tiny firm (Score:3, Funny)
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I dunno, maybe the firm isn't actually in Japan at all and it's just in a small Japanese centric district of another country like Little Tokyo in Los Angeles.
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Sort of like the final gag in the movie "Crazy People" - Sony: because caucasians are just too damn tall [youtube.com]
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I always seem to struggle the difference between different sizes of companies.
Normally I draw the line as such.
under 100 employees = Small Company, under 1000 employees = Medium Sized Company over 1000 = Large company.
That said, there are large companies that are Huge Intel has over 100,000 Employees AMD has over 10,000 employees So a 5000 employee company is small in comparison.
But with a "tiny japan firm" as the headline, I am picturing a company with under 20 employees, working on this problem. Not a
Re: tiny firm (Score:2)
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Ushio is primarily a lighting company, and by that standard they're small, with annual revenues of about 1.5 billion dollars.
Compared to conglomerates like GE and Philips that also produce lighting equipment, five thousand employees and 1.5 billion in revenue is not tiny, but it's quite modest. Compared to just the *lighting* divisions of those megacompanies, it's fairly comparable.
It's likely that the team working on this product is quite tine, but that doesn't make the company backing them small.
"thanks to a secretive Japanese company" (Score:2)
I should hope it's secretive.
Dunno any tech company that isn't.
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"I don't consider 5000 employees tiny."
Not to mention cracking something that doesn't exist yet.
Ushio (Score:4, Interesting)
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No.
LED lights of various types though. That modern enough for ya?
They're one if my go to sources for replacement lights.
Small Company doe it again (Score:2)
Re:Small Company doe it again (Score:4, Insightful)
They might have done it for money as well. Improving the world is nice and all as a side-benefit.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
EUV source (Score:5, Informative)
It is interesting that there is now an additional supplier for EUV light sources other than Cymer. Ushio obviously has much lower intensity source than Cymer as they are targeting mask inspection rather than the lithography scanners themselves for this product. I wonder if they will continue research into make higher intensity sources as this has been one of the major issues keeping EUV from being adopted more widely so competition might help.
I did find the Ushio Press Release [ushio.com] had more details than the Bloomberg article.
The only time I saw an EUV source was at SPIE several years back. It really did look like something that belonged on the Death Star rather than in a Fab.
Tiny Japan Firm (Score:3)
What is this, a firm for ANTS?
Squid-chips? (Score:3)
Hmm... Squid fishing + computer chip manufacture... Can the Great Old Ones actually get into the Internet? Will the trolls at 4chan chase them away?
Is this going to eviscerate Intel's stock? (Score:2)
Are Intel and AMD in trouble?
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Is this going to eviscerate Intel's stock?
I don't have a feel for how disruptive this will be.
Are Intel and AMD in trouble?
Intel is a buyer of this kind of equipment.
AMD doesn't care. They have TSMC fabricate their chips. TSMC will also be a buyer of this kind of equipment.
Neither will be notably affected by it in the next several years. TSMC already has such a big process lead over Intel that they may well wait a year or two before getting serious about the next step down. They're far enough ahead they have time to spend on optimizing yield of their 7nm process. (This equipment might help with that, though it may be overk