[HN Gopher] Nanoimprint Lithography Aims to Take on EUV
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Nanoimprint Lithography Aims to Take on EUV
Author : pseudolus
Score : 110 points
Date : 2025-01-02 15:14 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| notarealllama wrote:
| This is fascinating and looks promising! I've never heard of this
| but expect we will more in the near future, especially if they
| meet that 2028 target.
|
| I wonder what the environmental impact of this is versus extreme
| ultraviolet. Although they mention "cost of ownership" and
| throughput, I wonder if this has any hidden implications.
| huijzer wrote:
| Why should we care about the environmental impact of EUV
| machines? I think it's probably better to focus on things which
| have a real environmental impact. For example, EUV machines are
| estimated to 54 000 GWh per year by 2030 [1]. This number is a
| extremely high estimate because current usage is much lower (10
| GWh per tool annually according to the same article and in 2020
| ASM shipped their 100th EUV system, so current total about 1
| 000 GWh). This is sold as being "power hungry". Let's put these
| numbers in perspective.
|
| The United States alone consumes about 25 000 TWh "primary
| energy" pear year (includes electricy, transport, and heating)
| [2]. This means that in the extreme case, EUV machines consume
| 54 TWh / 25 000 TWh = 0.2% of total energy! In comparison, 27%
| of total U.S. energy consumption was used for transporting
| people and goods around in the US [3].
|
| And I made the example here before that if you are considering
| to turn off your phone in order to save battery at the risk of
| taking an accidental detour, then the decision is simple. Keep
| the phone. Driving one kilometer extra consumes multiple orders
| of magnitude more energy than powering a phone for hours. I
| think this idea holds in many more cases. Video meetings for
| example can save people from traveling all over the world. This
| saves energy and time as well.
|
| So I would say please go full power on chip manufacturing. It's
| way better for the environment (and often saves people time)
| than deciding to stop innovation and instead keep transporting
| everything around physically. I'm not saying transport is bad.
| I'm saying that standing in the way of innovation as an
| argument for better "environmental impact" is nonsensical.
|
| [1]: https://www.techinsights.com/blog/euv-lithography-power-
| hung...
|
| [2]: https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/united-states
|
| [3]: https://www.eia.gov/kids/using-and-saving-
| energy/transportat...
| saagarjha wrote:
| Nobody has to lose for lithography to win.
| jampekka wrote:
| It's nice to think that global warming can be solved with
| some technological gimmics so people don't have to make any
| lifestyle changes.
| huijzer wrote:
| Nobody will make the lifestyle changes. Or do you? Do you
| sit in a cold house as you type this? Do you not shower? Do
| you only grow your own vegetables in your backyard? Do you
| never use a car? Do you not even own a car? Do you have
| children? It's terrible for climate to have children?
|
| I think it sounds somewhat nice in theory to make lifestyle
| changes, and sure it helps, but it's not a solution. It's
| like if you are in financial trouble. Sure you can decide
| to not spend any money anymore. That definitely helps. But
| if you sell your car to save money and then cannot make it
| to job interviews anymore then you saved too much. You need
| to focus on getting money (and maybe spending it in the
| process) AND saving money. Focusing only on saving money is
| a losing strategy. Same with climate. Focusing only on
| using less energy is a losing strategy. Sometimes you need
| to spend energy to save energy in the future.
| atq2119 wrote:
| "Nobody", really?
|
| As a bare minimum, _many_ people can choose to take more
| environmentally friendly vacations. You don 't _have_ to
| go on a cruise, and yet that 's a booming industry. You
| don't _have_ to fly across an ocean. Almost everybody who
| does these things has the option to go on perfectly fine,
| perhaps even better, less carbon intensive alternative
| vacations.
|
| And yes, there are people who consciously make that
| lifestyle change. Not enough, of course. But only a Sith
| deals in absolutes.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| You guys are naive. Sure, it's possible, but most people
| don't do this, don't want to do this and will not do
| this. And of those that DO some of these things, a large
| subset probably does it in a ineffective way that OP so
| nicely illustrated in the phone/1 extra km by car
| example.
|
| No, the solution must be technical while people are
| allowed to maintain most of the comfort they are used to.
| Anything else and you will simply not be able to convince
| people to do so even if that means burning the world
| down.
| atq2119 wrote:
| This is one those cases of "why not both"?
|
| I totally agree that we need technical solutions. We have
| no hope without them. But it's also naive to think that
| endless growth without lifestyle changes is possible.
|
| That said, if you really think about it, the most
| important lifestyle change of all _is_ happening, and
| quite dramatically so: People are having fewer children.
| landryraccoon wrote:
| This is problematic though, isn't it?
|
| It's effectively mass subsidization for bad behavior at
| the expense of people who are altruistic. I don't see how
| it can be a winning strategy in the long run.
|
| For just a second, let's set aside our hopes and
| idealism, because I do realize how distasteful this world
| view may be.
|
| If the best hope for the environment is that altruistic
| people suffer a disadvantage so that everyone (including
| defectors who don't want to help anyone and only help
| themselves) can win, how is that not a strong long term
| advantage for anti-social behavior?
|
| "Great, don't take that plane ride, stop burning fossil
| fuels. More for me until we run out! I can even afford to
| have more kids because I don't care how impactful they
| are, while you responsibly go extinct."
|
| Feels like a losing battle, and not a fun way to lose
| either. I suspect that we all know, despite our hopes,
| that eight billion people will not decide to collectively
| give up their own happiness for the betterment of
| billions of strangers they aren't related to.
| geysersam wrote:
| Tons of people are doing lifestyle changes. Eating less
| meat, taking the train more, driving less etc etc.
|
| It's not enough, but it's necessary to limit CO2
| emissions during the transition.
| franga2000 wrote:
| > So I would say please go full power on chip manufacturing.
| It's way better for the environment
|
| The flip side of this is that chips becoming so cheap has
| caused a huge increase in e-waste. Basically everything has a
| computer inside it (think smart toothbrushes, fridges,
| toys...) and it usually leads to shorter product lifetimes.
| Manufacturers drop support for their apps and shut down cloud
| services sometimes as quickly as two years after manufacture,
| so things are thrown away. Smart gadgets are also generally
| more prone to breaking due to having more, more complex more
| and sensitive parts (no way that 10c MCU in a smart toaster
| is survivng 10 years of hot-cold cycles).
|
| If chips were more expensive, we wouldn't waste machine time
| on dual-core mediatek SOCs for 100 EUR smartphones with a
| "life expectantly" of less than two years. Manufacturers
| would make expensive and quality phones and those that can't
| afford them (I've been there) would buy older models used or
| refurbished. Longer product lifespans, more reuse, less
| waste.
| XorNot wrote:
| Or you could regulate the problem at it's source by passing
| laws to require the release of source code and flashing
| instructions for any product the manufacturer is dropping
| support for, required by escrow to the relevant governing
| authority of such tools for a product release when revenue
| exceeds a couple million dollars.
| tehjoker wrote:
| It's also a question of whether the higher powered process
| produces many lower power chips. I suspect this is the case.
| sva_ wrote:
| > For instance, compared to an EUV system employing a 250-watt
| light source, Canon estimates NIL consumes just one-tenth the
| energy.
|
| I'm not an expert on this but feel like a 250w light is not the
| major driver of cost in EUV? Or am I misunderstanding this?
| szundi wrote:
| Yes, it is 250w output but the efficiency is near zero, really
| dylan604 wrote:
| But you can bake a cake with a mere 60w light. That 250w is
| also much less than what it takes to run modern GPUs. so it's
| all relative.
| Szpadel wrote:
| AFAIK the main coat of EUV is cost of machines that will be
| obsolete in few years, so you want to produce as many chips
| using them as possible during that timeframe, they design a lot
| of around to maintain near 100% uptime of those machines. This
| include buffers before and after machines (so any unplanned
| stalls are mitigated) and technicians trained to do maintenance
| in F1 pitstop fashion. (source: some tour of some chipmaker I
| saw online, no longer remember details)
| lnsru wrote:
| These machines will be not obsolete for very long time. They
| are extremely rare and expensive. And the most of
| semiconductors are fabricated on mature nodes anyway.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Not obsolete, but the margin on fabs drops off pretty
| quickly once they're not at the cutting edge, as I
| understand it, so they need to make back their capital
| investment fairly quickly.
| nereye wrote:
| With exceptions, was reading recently an interesting die
| analysis/estimate of the costs and margins of
| manufacturing of the AD9361 chip (a 65nm, digital radio
| transceiver, introduced 12 years ago and still selling at
| retail today for $300/$400):
|
| https://zeptobars.com/en/read/AD9361-SDR-Analog-Devices-
| DAC-...
|
| Relevant quotes (and the current retail price if anything
| is higher now then when the article was written):
|
| " Retail price of AD9361 at distributes is 275$, volume
| price from manufacturer is 175$.
|
| That is quite an impressive added value! For 1,68$ of
| manufacturing cost we are getting 173,32$ of added value!
| Even Intel with their x86 or drug cartels could NOT do
| business like that."
|
| Of course, the actual margin needs to take into account
| NRE and other costs (and the above link does get into
| that) but, in this case, the manufacturing is a tiny
| sliver of the costs.
| yesthis wrote:
| That's not because they become obsolete, it's because they're
| the rate-limiting step (bottleneck).
| javiramos wrote:
| When an ASML Lithography Machine Goes Down:
| https://youtu.be/6v9gx3Z4oVk?
| nabla9 wrote:
| > to maintain near 100% uptime
|
| They have uptime only about 80%. They need to be stopped,
| calibrated and maintained frequently.
|
| They do not go obsolete quicly. They are constantly upgraded.
| 10-15 year old fabs and machines are still running all over
| the world. There are 1000 nm, 90nm, 40 nm, 14 nm fabs still
| running. High-end is not all of semiconductor industry.
| brookst wrote:
| Yes, it is more that margins are highest when a machine is
| brand new so it pays to maximize duty cycle. It will last
| for a decade, sure, but those 90nm fabs are not nearly as
| profitable as a 4nm fab.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| "Obsolete" which I guess for you means for the bleeding edge?
| Larger nanometer processes will still be in use since their
| cost will come down. For example when automakers stopped
| their orders for chips during COVID they pivoted (ported?) to
| higher nanometer designs because it wasn't a core
| requirement.
| Panoramix wrote:
| Weird article. The energy consumption of an EUV machine is
| about 1MW, that's why it's interesting to have an efficient
| alternative, not the actual useful power of the source.
| namibj wrote:
| That's why they're working on FEL light sources.
| DanielHB wrote:
| That sounds like a lot, but how many of those machines does
| an average fab have? Seriously I have no idea.
| f1shy wrote:
| I have visited 3 fabs, only one machine in each. Anecdotal
| info...
| DanielHB wrote:
| In that case 1MW doesn't sound like a whole lot to be
| worth optimizing for.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| According to Claude, that's about $1M/yr of electricity,
| assuming 24x7 usage.
|
| I assume the real saving is on the cost of the machine in
| the first place, and again relying on my AI buddy Claude:
|
| Let me break down the costs of both Nanoimprint
| Lithography (NIL) and Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV)
| lithography machines:
|
| NIL Machine Cost:
|
| Basic NIL systems: $1-3 million Advanced NIL systems
| (like those from Canon/Molecular Imprints): $10-15
| million
|
| EUV Machine Cost:
|
| Current ASML EUV systems (like the NXE:3400C):
| Approximately $150-200 million per unit Latest generation
| ASML EUV systems (NXE:3600D): Over $300 million per unit
| Installation and support infrastructure can add $30-50
| million
|
| **
|
| So, looks like $200M+ saving going with NIL vs EUV.
| saddat wrote:
| The driving CO2 amplifier should be already beyond that
| figure alone
| on_the_train wrote:
| Yes that's a strange quote. 250w is not only wrong, but
| absolutely minuscule compared to the tech around it. I work on
| the optics system
| majoe wrote:
| The EUV light is produced by shooting a pulsed laser on tin
| droplets.
|
| You already lose most of the input power in the pulsed laser.
| Then only a fraction of the energy of the light hitting the tin
| is converted to EUV light with the correct wavelength. Finally
| the EUV light has to be focused on the mask through complicated
| optics, which is notoriously difficult for EUV light.
|
| I guess, there are other sources of inefficiencies, that I
| forgot.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| Is there a reason EUV labs don't collocate with synchrotron
| FEL lasers?
| aboardRat4 wrote:
| Yes. Nucleophobia.
|
| Same reason it's called "euv" and not "soft x-ray".
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| "because the bit flips would then already have infected
| your processor in the factory" ?
| sgarland wrote:
| I'd just like to comment on how batshit insane the technology
| is.
|
| "We pulse lasers in sync with dispensing droplets of molten
| tin to produce light that doesn't exist outside of stars,
| then we use mirrors with a sub-angstrom surface roughness to
| precisely direct it onto wafers."
|
| Not to mention the fact that this is happening, IIRC,
| thousands of times per second, and the tool has to take the
| wafer's topography into account to focus the beam. Honestly,
| EUV litho makes every other technology you could describe
| sound like child's play.
| Fronzie wrote:
| And the tin droplets are in vacuum, with contamination of
| the wafer being very critical to control.
| leoc wrote:
| This old article from 2013 was funny: https://web.archive
| .org/web/20240416175801/https://semiaccur...
| dylan604 wrote:
| The first time I read about this process, I was convinced
| aliens were involved. Seriously, it's one of those crazy
| pitch meeting things that sounds ridiculous so of course it
| was green lit. "So we fire this laser, pew pew, into a
| field of molten tin droplets, and bingbangflam, you get
| this flash of light. So what do you think?" Hold my beer.
|
| It's clearly some people that are very smart that can only
| be explained by aliens
| pjdesno wrote:
| Roughly similar craziness: Disk drives mechanically
| position heads less than 1nm above the platter, with
| horizontal accuracy of significantly less than the 50nm
| track width, at a retail price of a few hundred $$ or less.
|
| 30 years ago I think you could have gotten any number of
| experts to explain why both EUV lithography and modern disk
| drives are impossible.
| thfuran wrote:
| Isn't it actually tin plasma?
| blux wrote:
| AFAIK, 250W is the net energy of light arriving at the wafer
| after it has reflected off of many mirrors, with a very
| inefficient process to generate light from the tin plasma on
| top of that.
| dralley wrote:
| Producing 250w of EUV light requires 20+ kilowatts of
| electricity pumped through an extremely expensive system of
| lasers and mirrors.
| noduerme wrote:
| > So instead, Canon drew on its inkjet printing know-how to apply
| the resist in optimum amounts to match the circuit pattern.
|
| Hopefully for those prices it will still let you send a fax if
| you run out of resin.
| lnsru wrote:
| We had many experiments with nanoimprint lithography at the
| university 20 years ago. The resolution was poor and the
| durability very poor. After dozens of imprints the "stamps"
| degraded heavily. I am curious if 20 years were enough to fix all
| the issues and it's really competitive today.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Wasn't this sort of how Intel got started in the 1970s? Some
| kind of contact printed ICs?
| formerly_proven wrote:
| You're probably thinking of contact lithography, where a 1:1
| mask is placed directly on the wafer and illuminated. This
| would've been used for the earliest IC processes, where you'd
| still be able to see the structures with the naked eye or a
| loupe.
| f1shy wrote:
| That is basically like home grown PCB but at very tiny.
| hinkley wrote:
| I would think you'd want to make them out of something crazy
| like diamond or titanium carbide. What did you make yours out
| of?
| usrnm wrote:
| Anything that disrupts the monopoly ASML currently has is a good
| thing
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Why do you say that? Does ASML hurt the consumer or the market
| in some way? Has it been caught using dodgy practices against
| its workers, like Amazon has, against its customers, like the
| Wells Fargo has, or something else?
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| Because its bad to have a single point of failure in our
| supply chain
| hinkley wrote:
| How did that happen? I've never been clear on how we got here.
| Just some vague stuff about how others tried and failed.
| cma wrote:
| Intel thought the tech wasn't mature enough and decided to
| wait longer. They and the US were originally part of
| inventing it in the 90s (EUV LLC public private partnership),
| but sold it off with terms that allowed us to have export
| controls over ASML's part of it.
| hinkley wrote:
| Man, US tech and the 90's.
|
| Al Gore pushed for The Partnership for a Next Generation
| Vehicle. They say the only vehicle the PNGV produced was
| the Prius, and Toyota was not eligible to participate. But
| they freaked out because the Americans were taking it
| seriously and created a dream team by recruiting their best
| people into a new program. Only it was all for show. So TM
| ended up with a serious car and everyone else with
| demonstrators.
| spuz wrote:
| I wonder how big the wafers can be in the NIL system. It
| definitely sounds like the larger the wafer, the more problems
| you will have with deformation, alignment etc. if they have to
| reduce the wafer size in then that would also affect their
| ability to compete with EUV.
| ov_ov_ov wrote:
| Think is on roll-to-roll flexible substrate, no wafers.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| OP states that this can go down to 14nm. What I am interested in
| is whether older and larger processes (say ~50nm) can be done at
| a much cheaper cost than traditional methods.
|
| A lot of stuff simply does not require the most advanced chips.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Canon has been selling nanoprint litography machines for a long
| time.
|
| FPA-1200NZ2C came out 2015-2016. Press release from a sale 2017
| https://global.canon/en/news/2017/20170720.html
| atq2119 wrote:
| Note that 14nm processes (which are quite old by now) are not
| the same as 14nm feature sizes. I'm not sure what these
| machines are capable of, since some details may well be lost in
| translation in this kind of publication. And I'm only an
| interested enthusiast, I don't work in the field directly.
|
| But towards the end of the article they talk of targeting 8nm
| line width in 2028, which _is_ impressive. Maybe this time
| around NIL actually becomes real for high-end processes?
| pama wrote:
| These numbers are all mindboggling. I understand that the
| modern specs for EUV dont mean wire width, but if with this
| future NIL we truly get down to 8nm wide wires, perhaps we
| should start counting the number of atoms across the width of
| the wire (around 30).
| phonon wrote:
| These are feature sizes. (Comparable to the 13.5 nm of EUV)
| shaism wrote:
| The answer almost certainly is no. While lithography is one of
| the largest single contributor to manufacturing costs, the
| contribution to overall cost is still far below 10%.
|
| And one cannot simply substitute an optical lithography with a
| nano imprint machine without redesigning some part of the
| process (etch, metrology etc.).
|
| Investing R&D resources for a (best case) 10% reduction in
| costs while still having a decent probability of failure in a
| big but declining node is not worth it.
| y04nn wrote:
| For everyone interested on technical details of the TSMC EUV
| process I would highly recommend this CCC talk [1] (From Silicon
| to Sovereignty: How Advanced Chips are Redefining Global
| Dominance).
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42546231
| sschueller wrote:
| I knew the process was complex especially with the light source
| but I didn't realize that diffraction was something they also
| use which is absolutely insane.
| modeless wrote:
| Cool! I uploaded the video to YouTube here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB-y-tDlOSA
|
| (It's licensed CC-BY so this should be allowed, and I like
| having videos like this on YouTube where I can easily watch
| them from anywhere and add them to my playlists.)
| mjrpes wrote:
| The "transistors shipped" in the history of computing was an
| interesting number. In 2024 it is now over 10^24. That's a
| massive number, more than estimate number of stars in the
| universe. But, in another sense, still quite small. It
| finally surpassed Avogadro's number, or 6*10^23 particles.
| This is the equivalent of a small shot glass filled with
| water (molecules).
| westurner wrote:
| Nanoimprint lithography (NIL)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoimprint_lithography
| hinkley wrote:
| I feel like this tech would be better suited to flexible
| circuitry, because flexible can be continuous feed, and why try
| to limit or size your stamp to the surface area of a wafer when
| you could just size it to the width of a spool? Also flexible
| circuits tend to be at a much larger feature size and so it's
| okay if they're a couple generations behind, but this is still
| far ahead of printed circuitry.
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