Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

[hengheng]

EUV has always been about achieving high enough power to be economically viable. It was never about making chips at any cost.

I remember reading the tinfoil hat theory about three-letter agencies making low-quantity high-cost chips at incredible process sizes in order to break encryption. I doubt that's still as viable today as it was before leakage currents started dominating, but it was an impressively plausible theory.

[maxglute]

>economically viable

IIRC EUV development picked plasma over synchrotron because plasma projected to be cheaper, even though technically synchrotron had more benefits. Queue many, many years of solving for technical challenges for LPP and now commercialized EUV machines cost 200m, 400m for next high NA. Which is about the cost of multiple small or single medium size synchrotron facility. It's amazing plasma EUV works, but it's also a failure in the sense that it is FAR less economical than originally envisioned, which explains why particle accelerator route is still being worked on.

[smallmancontrov]

Back in the day, HP advertised that the distributed amplifiers in their 26.5 and 50 GHz equipment were made with e-beams, but the process size wasn't anything special, certainly not by today's standards. I'm not really sure what drove the decision.

[artemonster]

that tinfoil hat theory, just as basically all of them, can only be produced by people that have absolutely zero understanding of the topic. The amount of challenges that industry has faced during the relatively fast progress through nodes is just non skippable, as there were so many things to be discovered through very expensive and long brute force (just one example: high k dielectrics)

[christkv]

Where is my superconductor based CPUs preferably at room temperature.

[DevelopingElk]

Free Electron Lasers have potential to generate more tunable radiation with higher luminosity. Despite this they aren't a drop in replacement for the current EUV light sources. A free electron laser is 200 meters long, so a single laser would feed multiple EUV machines for it to be economical. This technology is very promising but it has been under development for a while. Does anyone know what the current difficulties are?

[muhdeeb]

As far as I understand it, smaller scale XFEL devices still suffer from poor aim, even though now these machines have been miniaturized to basement scales. They don’t need to be significant fractions of a kilometer anymore. This aim issue will probably be solved in the next few years. It’s an exciting time to be in X ray science, particularly anything ultrafast.

[jdaw0]

https://archive.ph/O9f3E

[sevensor]

Headline stuck me funny; I was working in ion implantation 20 years ago. Of course they’re talking about lithography, because those guys are the fighter pilots / first violinists of semiconductor manufacturing, they get all the attention.

[avs733]

This is such a good analogy. Implant and thin film deposition never gets any respect…

[mgnn]

This article from half a year ago has photos and diagrams https://spectrum.ieee.org/euv-fel

[kev009]

Is the idea that this will scale? You can already build down to the atomic level with scanning tunneling microscopy (thanks IBM).

[adastra22]

No, we cannot. IBM moved neutral atoms around on an inert surface. No one has demonstrated building covalent structures (or metallic, or ionic for that matter).

My startup is trying to do this, and it is a fiendishly hard problem.

[itishappy]

Yes, electron-beam lithography is fantastic but also fantastically slow. Sorta like building a Lego model brick by brick vs layer by layer. It's still used for reticle fabrication and repair.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-beam_lithography

Edit: Confused SEMs and STMs, but the principle described above applies to both.

[gorkish]

If you want to make features tinier than EUV allows, you do what you have done for the last few decades and make them directly, but real slow and costly, with electron beams. IMO at some point it seems likely that someone will simply decide to brute force e beam litho up to mass production rates.

[anfilt]

Direct-write lithography has been a thing for a long time such as EBL. It's just SLOW. So it's only really viable for devices that are made in low quantities, simple devices or research.

[sroussey]

I was hoping to see table top particle accelerators like those at UCLA were progressing into something usable for lithography. Which makes me wonder, why not use electrons instead of light?

[thmsths]

From my non expert understanding, we already do kinda. The masks used for photolithography are made using an electron beam, allowing for a much greater resolution than what the underlying photolithography allows. But this is far too slow for large scale production.

Scanning an electron beam, repeatedly over an entire waffer would take forever. So instead we do it once, to make the mask, and that mask is then used over and over to expose the waffer.

This is a bit little injection molding: the mold is very expensive and made with a far better manufacturing process than the plastic pieces that it will eventually produce, but this is the price to pay for high volumes and low costs.

[xeonmc]

Ebeam is a pencil, photolithography is a printing press.

[CamperBob2]

It might be as simple as the fact that anything the electrons hit will pick up a huge electric charge. Now you've got ESD problems from hell, not to mention unwanted X-ray generation.

[JimBlackwood]

Funny, we asked why they didn’t use a cyclotron during an ASML visit

Things would get a bit radioactive at those energies, though.

[russellbeattie]

Lead is cheap, right?

Very cool you visited ASML. Anything exciting/interesting you'd be willing to tell the class?

[ur-whale]

https://archive.is/HKDho

[n0n0n4t0r]

So they basically want to use synchrotron?

[PaulHoule]

Hooked up to a free electron laser

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-electron_laser

or some similar kind of device that turns the momentum of electrons into light. I'm a little surprised that they didn't try something like a FEL first instead of that terribly problematic device that uses highly inefficient lasers to blow up tin droplets, itself a high-loss process that produces contamination and resulted in years of delay developing materials for

https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories/2022/the-euv-pellicle-i...

[phkahler]

My bet is on plasma Wakefield accelerators to feed the FEL. But yeah a synchrotron might do as an intermediate step. Free Electron Lasers can be tuned to different wavelengths all the way to x-rays.