Or this video, which came out before Veritasium's
replyhttps://youtu.be/NGFhc8R_uO4
replyOr this presentation which came out way long ago.
This is worth the (re)watch every time it comes up.
replyI 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.
replyThe 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.
replyYou forgot WITH LASERS, and IN A VACUUM
replyThe old SemiAccurate article https://semiaccurate.com/2013/02/13/euv-moves-forward-two-st... was very funny.
replyIIRC 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.
replyYes 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.
replyBut 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.
replyOh 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.
replyWhich isn't easy considering they explode tin droplets in the machine. I think that's the point the other commenter wanted to make.
replyThink about the purity requirements that places on the tin.
reply> 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.
reply< 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.
replyI have shares in one of their biggest customers, and one of their customer’s biggest customers.
replyWe 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.
replyWhat does that mean?
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.
replyThe 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
replydeleted
replyThere is such a thing as X-ray lithography, but it comes with significant challenges that make it not really worth it compared to EUV.
replyI'd like to hear more about these challenges
replyStochastic effects become a bigger and bigger problem. At some point (EUV) a single photon has enough energy to ionize atoms, causing a cascade that causes effects to bloom outside of the illumination spot.
replyAs 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.
replyThe 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.
replyAs I hear it, the decision had large economic component related to Masks and even OPC.
100%. EUV barely works. XRay litho takes all the issues with EUV and cranks them up to 11. It will take comparable effort to EUV, if not more, to get XRay litho up and running, and I'm not aware of anyone approaching this to anywhere near the level of investment that ASML (and others) have pumped into developing EUV tech. We may get there eventually as a species, but we're a ways off.
replyIt 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.
replySpecifically, 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.
reply(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.
replyAny source to this? I am hearing this for the first time.
replyITs easy to make X-rays, you just hit a metal target with electrons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_tube
replyHere's your link without the surveillance
replyAsianometry 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)
replyOkay this is weird.
reply> 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.
replyFrom the first video I thought they had already shipped this, but it sounds like they were describing what their new model was.
replyThis seems like a product with a very very long sales pipeline, so I wonder if they work on pre-orders with existing customers but announce delivery milestones only as they come?