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Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

economist.com

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Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#21

Post by monocasa »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #18
stanleykm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this, from what I’ve read electron beam is too slow for the required throughput. The ASML EUV machine can etch something like 170 wafers per hour. Using an electron beam would be far too slow for 2-3 wafers per minute.

It would be interesting to see if this tech was viable for dev boards. i.e. when you want to design a new 2nm chip, what if you were using electron beam chips to test out designs?

That would almost certainly be more expensive. When people talk about modern masks being $15M or so for each mask set, a huge fraction of the cost is this process for the masks.

It also doesn't tell you as much about how your design actually runs on the process in question.

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#22

Post by cycomanic »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #18
stanleykm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this, from what I’ve read electron beam is too slow for the required throughput. The ASML EUV machine can etch something like 170 wafers per hour. Using an electron beam would be far too slow for 2-3 wafers per minute.

It would be interesting to see if this tech was viable for dev boards. i.e. when you want to design a new 2nm chip, what if you were using electron beam chips to test out designs?

E-beam lithography is used for research purposes all the time, so yes it's already used for "dev-boards".

That said, apart from the economics (it is very slow), you are also constrained with respect to the size of what you can write, the writing fields is typically quite small, if you want to make a chip larger than that you need to stitch fields together and you have to deal with stitching errors (which becomes more and more difficult the smaller your structures are).

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#24

Post by 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.

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#25

Post by russellbeattie »

JimBlackwood wrote: post #13

Funny, we asked why they didn’t use a cyclotron during an ASML visit Things would get a bit radioactive at those energies, though.

Lead is cheap, right?

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

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#26

Post by christkv »

hengheng wrote: post #24

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 th…

Where is my superconductor based CPUs preferably at room temperature.

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#27

Post by muhdeeb »

DevelopingElk wrote: post #19

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 difficulti…

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.

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#28

Post by adastra22 »

kev009 wrote: post #11

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

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.

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#29

Post by artemonster »

hengheng wrote: post #24

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 th…

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)

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#30

Post by bobmcnamara »

stanleykm wrote: post #9
thmsths wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ove…

Adding to this, from what I’ve read electron beam is too slow for the required throughput. The ASML EUV machine can etch something like 170 wafers per hour. Using an electron beam would be far too slow for 2-3 wafers per minute.

I would like to double check some units.

2-3 wafers per minute would be 120-18 wafers per hour - did you mean wafers per hour for both?

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