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Japan on edge of EUV lithography chip-making revolution

asiatimes.com

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Re: Japan on edge of EUV lithography chip-making revolution

#41

Post by EvgeniyZh »

alephnerd wrote: post #13
cherryteastain wrote: post #7

Canon and Nikon are also working on alternatives such as nanoimprint lithography [1]. Chinese universities and companies are working on particle accelerator based EUV sources [2]. Question is, will they be able to actually commercialize it before ASML manages to get improved versions of their current litho machines out the door? Commercialization of a technology like this can easily take 5-10 years, and ASML aren't t…

> Question is, will they be able to actually commercialize it before ASML manages to get improved versions of their current litho machines out the door Canon and Nikon don't need to be bleeding edge. Majority of the chip fabrication market is 20nm, 28nm, and 40nm along with analog chips (60nm+). The sub-20nm chips will become more common as more and more fabs get turned on and EUV eventually gets commoditized, but th…

Canon and Nikon have these already, and yet their market share is pretty small

Re: Japan on edge of EUV lithography chip-making revolution

#43

Post by kredd »

jolux wrote: post #39
l5870uoo9y wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of the immediate ban on ASML, China has made a geopolitical and strategic decision to obtain advanced chip manufacturing capabilities be it in 5, 10 or 20 years. Would be timely if Western politicians showed same concern for national manufacturing capabilities instead of continuously relying on outsourcing.

> Would be timely if Western politicians showed same concern for national manufacturing capabilities instead of continuously relying on outsourcing. You mean like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act

I’m actually excited to see these projects come into fruition. If USA can pull it off, and become competitive in global markets, it’ll a proof that we can still build big projects when we want to. If things go sideways with nothing coming online by the end of 2020s, it won’t look good especially knowing how China just keeps outbuilding us.

Re: Japan on edge of EUV lithography chip-making revolution

#44

Post by bradleyjg »

epoxia wrote: post #16
bradleyjg wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with 30%+ of the raw cost of chip manufacturing goes to energy usage alone Is the marginal cost of production at all relevant compared to the upfront capital outlay?

You can get a loan to spread out payments, reducing operating costs would be similar to reducing those payments. It also impacts viability and resale in second hand markets.

Sure, but the question is the scale. Is debt service 10x operating costs? 2x? 50x? .5x?

Those imply very different sorts of business.

Re: Japan on edge of EUV lithography chip-making revolution

#45

Post by bradleyjg »

ksec wrote: post #8
bradleyjg wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with 30%+ of the raw cost of chip manufacturing goes to energy usage alone Is the marginal cost of production at all relevant compared to the upfront capital outlay?

One is OpeX and the other is CapeX. I would argue they are both important.

Don’t confuse the map for the territory. Dollars are fungible.

Re: Japan on edge of EUV lithography chip-making revolution

#46

Post by mensetmanusman »

coliveira wrote: post #36
mensetmanusman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASML having competition is good for everyone. Seems tariffs are a win/win/win

I haven't seen any success on the Trump/Biden tariffs. They only managed to weaken US companies by cutting access to Asian markets. China is doing just fine.

Reducing sales of BYD in the US is a realpolitik win if the goal is to slightly increase war machine production capability in the US.

Re: Japan on edge of EUV lithography chip-making revolution

#47

Post by evrimoztamur »

m3kw9 wrote: post #40

Anyone that wants to short ASML out the door on Monday, please reconsider. It will take 10-15 years to make a machine like ASMLs from end to end.

Also consider that this article is from 7 Aug, with Canon in particular showing good post-crisis recovery.

Re: Japan on edge of EUV lithography chip-making revolution

#48

Post by talldayo »

coliveira wrote: post #29
cherryteastain wrote: post #7

Canon and Nikon are also working on alternatives such as nanoimprint lithography [1]. Chinese universities and companies are working on particle accelerator based EUV sources [2]. Question is, will they be able to actually commercialize it before ASML manages to get improved versions of their current litho machines out the door? Commercialization of a technology like this can easily take 5-10 years, and ASML aren't t…

If you consider that China is unable to get ASML equipment, they have strong incentive to improve on this technology immediately. If Chinese companies start this path, then the issue is not if ASML will have improved, but if they will be able to withstand the competition.

Eh, we've got time. When NATO allies stopped selling China engines for their fighter jets, it took China more than 15 years to bootstrap an aerospace industry that could design engines on-par with Russia. There are a lot of things that China has every incentive to invest in, but literally cannot as a result of sanctions.

On top of that - an underappreciated aspect of lithography is yield. It's likely China can already beat ASML in a lab setting with <5% yield rates, but that's not a competitive process. What makes TSMC so valuable is their relatively high yield on cutting-edge node technology, alongside their fairly large capacity to supply multiple businesses at once. China has to design a scalable EUV alternative, bring it up to acceptable/profitable yield and quality control, and then scale it to replace the demand for most of the domestic chip clients. It's a lot of work, and it would not surprise me if we saw a lot of China's chip efforts echo their confident-but-slowed progress in engine design.

Re: Japan on edge of EUV lithography chip-making revolution

#49

Post by adrian_b »

alephnerd wrote: post #19
adrian_b wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The yield rate by itself is not very relevant. It also matters which are the energy and materials consumption, the occupied floor area and the acquisition and maintenance prices associated with that yield. When all those are small enough, it may be worthwhile to replace a big and expensive fast machine with many smaller and cheaper slow machines.

Fair point! That said, 10% reduction in power is decent along with the reduction in mirrors, but it would still take some effort for an attempt like this to be cost competitive compared to licensing from ASML.

As another poster has already said, the power is reduced 10 times, not by 10%.

At such a power reduction, it should be possible to use a much smaller and cheaper EUV source, allowing the use of multiple lithography systems, or increase a lot the throughput achievable with the current EUV sources.

I hope that they have modeled correctly the losses in the mirrors. Here the incidence angle of the EUV light on the mirrors is much closer to a right angle than in the ASML system. It is likely that this increases the absorption in the mirror in comparison with a mirror on which the light falls at an angle far from perpendicular, as used by ASML.

EDIT:

Unfortunately this paper might be a hoax.

I have read the 2013 paper that they give as reference [2] and as the basis of the claim for the 10 times reduction in power losses.

There the losses in the mirror are given only for incidence angles no greater than 21 degrees, very far from a perpendicular incidence. Moreover the data imply that at higher incidence angles the losses increase a lot.

Therefore the system with 4 mirrors at high incidence angles will have much higher losses than a system with 10 mirrors at low incidence angles, unless better mirror materials were discovered in the future.

So ASML must have analyzed this simple system and dismissed it as impossible to make with the known materials.

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