81–90 of 111 posts
So how small are individual components (e.g., transistors) nowadays? Presumably there's a lower limit: once you're a few atoms across, it seems that you can't go any smaller (?).
Gates are about 30-50 nm wide, even though they're called '3nm' for marketing reasons.
Right now the only way to make "bright" EUV (100-200 watts) is to spray fine drops of a metal in a stream, then target and blast each drop with a laser.
pretty wild way to make light.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is such a thing as X-ray lithography, but it comes with significant challenges that make it not really worth it compared to EUV.
I'd like to hear more about these challenges
https://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/662/instruments/mirrorlab/xopt...
Why this is a big deal: Right now the only way to make "bright" EUV (100-200 watts) is to spray fine drops of a metal in a stream, then target and blast each drop with a laser. pretty wild way to make light.
This video is a really cool dive into EUV for the uninitiated (me) https://youtu.be/MiUHjLxm3V0?si=kEPSicC2WXYhcQ6L
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have shares in one of their biggest customers, and one of their customer’s biggest customers. We are quickly leaving the realm of dependent variables still looking anything like diversification.
It seems like you want someone to ask you what the two companies are. So - what are the two companies?
It's impressive to see that there still was so much room left to improve EUV, but I can't help but be royally pissed off that it will be a looooong time before we the people see any practical benefit of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The 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 i…
Why this is a big deal: Right now the only way to make "bright" EUV (100-200 watts) is to spray fine drops of a metal in a stream, then target and blast each drop with a laser. pretty wild way to make light.
And they’re now going to hit each drop three! times instead of two, and increase to 100,000 drops per second. Very hard to imagine.