ASML Unveils EUV Light Source Advance That Could Yield 50% More Chips By 2030 (reuters.com) 26
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Researchers at ASML Holding say they have found a way to boost the power of the light source in a key chip making machine to turn out up to 50% more chips by decade's end, to help retain the Dutch company's edge over emerging U.S. and Chinese rivals. ASML is the world's only maker of commercial extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, a critical tool for chipmakers such as TSMC, Intel and others in producing advanced computing chips. "It's not a parlor trick or something like this, where we demonstrate for a very short time that it can work," Michael Purvis, ASML's lead technologist for its EUV source light, said in an interview. "It's a system that can produce 1,000 watts under all the same requirements that you could see at a customer," he added, speaking at the company's California facilities near San Diego. [...]
With the technological advance revealed on Monday, which is being reported here for the first time, ASML aims to outdistance any would-be rivals by improving the most technologically challenging aspect of the machines. This is the quest to generate EUV light with the right power and properties to turn out chips at high volume. 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. The chief advantage is that greater power translates into the ability to make more chips every hour, helping to lower the cost of each. Chips are printed similar to a photograph, where the EUV light is shone on a silicon wafer coated with special chemicals called a photoresist. With a more powerful EUV light source, chip factories need shorter exposure times. "We'd like to make sure that our customers can keep on using EUV at a much lower cost," Teun van Gogh, executive vice president for the NXE line of EUV machines at ASML, told Reuters. Van Gogh said customers should be able to process about 330 silicon wafers an hour on each machine by the end of the decade, up from 220 now. Depending on the size of a chip, each wafer can hold anywhere from scores to thousands of the devices.
ASML got the power boost by doubling down on an approach that already places its machines among the most complex inventions of humans. To produce light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, ASML's machine shoots a stream of molten droplets of tin through a chamber, where a massive carbon dioxide laser heats them into plasma. This is a superheated state of matter in which the tin droplets become hotter than the sun and emit EUV light, to be collected by precision optic equipment supplied by Germany's Carl Zeiss AG and fed into the machine to print chips. 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. [...] ASML believes the techniques it used to hit 1,000 watts will unlock continued advances in the future, Purvis said, adding, "We see a reasonably clear path toward 1,500 watts, and no fundamental reason why we couldn't get to 2,000 watts."
With the technological advance revealed on Monday, which is being reported here for the first time, ASML aims to outdistance any would-be rivals by improving the most technologically challenging aspect of the machines. This is the quest to generate EUV light with the right power and properties to turn out chips at high volume. 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. The chief advantage is that greater power translates into the ability to make more chips every hour, helping to lower the cost of each. Chips are printed similar to a photograph, where the EUV light is shone on a silicon wafer coated with special chemicals called a photoresist. With a more powerful EUV light source, chip factories need shorter exposure times. "We'd like to make sure that our customers can keep on using EUV at a much lower cost," Teun van Gogh, executive vice president for the NXE line of EUV machines at ASML, told Reuters. Van Gogh said customers should be able to process about 330 silicon wafers an hour on each machine by the end of the decade, up from 220 now. Depending on the size of a chip, each wafer can hold anywhere from scores to thousands of the devices.
ASML got the power boost by doubling down on an approach that already places its machines among the most complex inventions of humans. To produce light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, ASML's machine shoots a stream of molten droplets of tin through a chamber, where a massive carbon dioxide laser heats them into plasma. This is a superheated state of matter in which the tin droplets become hotter than the sun and emit EUV light, to be collected by precision optic equipment supplied by Germany's Carl Zeiss AG and fed into the machine to print chips. 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. [...] ASML believes the techniques it used to hit 1,000 watts will unlock continued advances in the future, Purvis said, adding, "We see a reasonably clear path toward 1,500 watts, and no fundamental reason why we couldn't get to 2,000 watts."
the race continues (Score:2)
Re:the race continues (Score:4, Informative)
There's a startup in the US that apparently reaised $100 million for particle accelerator-based photolithography, but they're getting quite a bit of skepticism. There's also university research into new technologies of course, but I don't know of any really serious push or anything likely to deliver "soonish." It took ASML thirty years to get EUV working.
The Chinese are certainly investing heavily in lithography for obvious reasons. They might have something in the ballpark "soonish" or they might not. I wouldn't hold my breath on equivalent or surpassing though.
Re: the race continues (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
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The diameter of a Si atom is 0.11nm, or 1.1Å, so there doesn't seem to be much left in getting to the finish line. Already, at Intel's 1.8nm, we're looking at ~16 atoms. I've not even gotten to the number of dopant atoms that would be too many to produce p- type or n- type silicon
Re:the race continues (Score:4, Informative)
Already, at Intel's 1.8nm, we're looking at ~16 atoms.
The process numbers do not mean feature size for a long time already. They are more like: What feature size the old process would have if we achieved the same part count per unit of area? Lets call this number the new "feature size".
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The process names haven't actually indicated feature size since about 1997 (~250 nm). It's supposed to indicate the "equivalent" of a 90's era transistor. Leading edge EUV machines have a resolution of about 10-15 nm, and most actual features are considerably bigger than that.
You CAN push around individual atoms, and you can do some really cool stuff that way. It's impractically expensive though, and impractically slow to make anything that's not a tech demo.
Re: the race continues (Score:3)
They are doing research too. The real danger for them is a completely new tech, not someone iterating faster.
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It is both new tech AND iterating faster, either one will slaughter their profit margin and demand.
Yes, either thing would do that, but there is far less chance of the latter. ASML is incredibly multinational and extremely far ahead, they have talented people from all over the planet and a commanding lead in this technology.
Re:the race continues (Score:5, Informative)
Excuse me? (Score:1, Funny)
To produce light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, ASML's machine shoots a stream of molten droplets of tin through a chamber, where a massive carbon dioxide laser heats them into plasma. This is a superheated state of matter in which the tin droplets become hotter than the sun and emit EUV light
This is how they produce ultraviolet light? I am hardly an ultraviolet scientst, though I have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express, but there has to be a better way.
Re: Excuse me? (Score:3)
Re:Excuse me? (Score:4, Informative)
ASML's machine shoots a stream of molten droplets of tin through a chamber, where a massive carbon dioxide laser heats them into plasma. ... but there has to be a better way.
No, EUV lithography has to be impossible. That's what most people said, but some very persistent scientists eventually showed otherwise. It is the most amazing, most expensive non-military machine ever sold. It shoots each droplet 3 times, and 50,000 of them per second. Lithography needs a point source of light.
Here is a quote on the Zeiss mirrors it uses:
If you were to scale one of these mirrors (which are about the size of a dinner plate or slightly larger) to be the size of Germany, the largest surface imperfection—the tallest "mountain"—would be less than 1 millimeter high
Veritasium did a great video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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No, EUV lithography has to be impossible. That's what most people said, but some very persistent scientists eventually showed otherwise.
To be fair, this was said about most major scientific discoveries, e.g. the scanning electron microscope was effectively invented by a bunch of outcast physicists who used to be openly mocked for their ideas on how to control the electron beam.
Until they got it working.
Re:Excuse me? (Score:5, Informative)
UV != UV and exposing the Pollock painting that is a typical Holiday Inn Express bedsheet involves UV light that is an order of magnitude longer in wavelength.
In fact just beyond UVC 280-200nm being the kind used to disinfect and the shortest wavelength commonly available to product you end up at 100nm where the light literally cannot move through air anymore and only propagate in a vacuum. That is already a challenge for DeepUV (DUV) lithography which requires specialised lasers.
In this regime an order of magnitude shorter wavelengths than DUV you're left with plasma as the only artificial light source and the sun's solar corona as the only natural one. This "light" has more in common with x-rays than anything else in the UV spectrum. In fact Bell Labs toyed with this in the early 90s and even called it soft X-ray projection lithography (13.8nm instead of 13.5nm what ASML uses).
Another fun fact ASML used to use synchrotrons as a light source, so that shared more in common with particle accelerators to make this range of "light".
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So what you're saying is if we tell Elon, he'll want to build a station orbiting the sun where they just hold the wavers with a mask against the sun and wait for the magic to happen.
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Please no, he already pollutes space too much as it is.
These ASML lithography machines are ... (Score:2)
... totally next level. The amount of science, engineering and precision that go into these is mind-boggling. The shoot 50k tin microdropplets per second and hit each one with a laser, with an error margin of 0 (zero). Quite impressive.
Don't blink. (Score:2)
europe (Score:2)
Europe needs to kiss these people's boots, and maybe take a look at how to fix their house.