41–50 of 75 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
No, you can absolutely make specialized chips that are orders of magnitude better than the commercial state of the art if you don't care about mass production or operational costs. I can bet there are superconductor/photonics/topologically different/strange memory/smaller process size prototypes around. Right now we are getting to the limits of transistor sizes, but even a couple of years ago experimental prototypes…
Aside from LCS35, most cryptographic problems are about as easy with two processors that are half as fast as one processor that costs twice as much.
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?
Ebeam is a pencil, photolithography is a printing press.
1.5B transistors in a current intel core chip
300 die per wafer
150 wafers an hour
That means each litho tool prints 6.75 x 10^13 “transistors” per hour. In more useful units, that’s 18.75B transistors per second.
Drawing them one line at a time is technically feasible but…I’ll bet you are talking single digit DIE per hour if that.
And that is for one layer of lithography. I’ve seen estimates from 5-20 layers of lithography using EUV tools at the 3-7nm nodes. So the time scale is even more warped.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
No, you can absolutely make specialized chips that are orders of magnitude better than the commercial state of the art if you don't care about mass production or operational costs. I can bet there are superconductor/photonics/topologically different/strange memory/smaller process size prototypes around. Right now we are getting to the limits of transistor sizes, but even a couple of years ago experimental prototypes…
proof? i'm just like... where? where do you think people are making these chips and using which ovens?
> smaller process size prototypes around
no there aren't. there just aren't. you could hide this in your basement about as easily as you could hide building your own space shuttle (and launching).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where is my superconductor based CPUs preferably at room temperature.
Does a superconducting semiconductor even make sense philosophically?
Also, some of today's work in quantum computers uses superconducting qubits. Maybe that's in the same research stage now. No idea if it will ever become practical.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why though?
And you can’t use existing tools. You need an atomically precise scanning probe tip with very specific reactive chemical structure, but NOT react with the surface while scanning with a voltage bias.
And where do you source feedstock from? Needs to be delivered to the surface in passive form but be activated when needed to switch to being chemically reactive in a specific way to get it on the transfer tool and then onto the part being built.
Oh, and this is without even getting into how many electronic structures are entirely invisible at certain voltages, everything looks like an identical blobish shape, surfaces are reconfiguring themselves constantly, and probes randomly crash due to piezo creep, destroying days or weeks of work.
My startup has solutions to all of these problems. And the payoff at the end is reliable, scalable quantum computers, followed by full-on Drexlarian nanotech. But yeah, it’s a fiendishly hard problem.
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…
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you can absolutely make specialized chips that are orders of magnitude better than the commercial state of the art if you don't care about mass production or operational costs. I can bet there are superconductor/photonics/topologically different/strange memory/smaller process size prototypes around. Right now we are getting to the limits of transistor sizes, but even a couple of years ago experimental prototypes…
> No, you can absolutely make specialized chips proof? i'm just like... where? where do you think people are making these chips and using which ovens? > smaller process size prototypes around no there aren't. there just aren't. you could hide this in your basement about as easily as you could hide building your own space shuttle (and launching).
You do realize we all know it's impossible to have any degree of certainty in asserting the non-existence of something, right?