[HN Gopher] Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator
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Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator
Author : jdaw0
Score : 35 points
Date : 2025-03-17 18:35 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| jdaw0 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/O9f3E
| n0n0n4t0r wrote:
| So they basically want to use synchrotron?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Hooked up to a free electron laser
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-electron_laser
|
| or some similar kind of device that turns the momentum of
| electrons into light. I'm a little surprised that they didn't
| try something like a FEL first instead of that terribly
| problematic device that uses highly inefficient lasers to blow
| up tin droplets, itself a high-loss process that produces
| contamination and resulted in years of delay developing
| materials for
|
| https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories/2022/the-euv-pellicle-i...
| monocasa wrote:
| They tried both in the initial design phase, there's upsides
| and downsides, but ultimately thought that the tin droplet
| laser was more liekly to actually get done more or less on
| the time schedule requested, and so that's where the bulk of
| the capital went.
|
| Interestingly China has been continuing working on the
| synchotron based EUV litho idea (in addition to work to
| create domestically built tin laser EUV lithos machines).
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07323-z
| itishappy wrote:
| Love me some FELs. Pretty sure they did try this, but
| determined it to be too large and costly for the technology
| of the time.
|
| https://www.asianometry.com/p/euv-lithography-but-with-a-
| fre...
|
| https://www.euvlitho.com/2017/P18.pdf
| phkahler wrote:
| My bet is on plasma Wakefield accelerators to feed the FEL. But
| yeah a synchrotron might do as an intermediate step. Free
| Electron Lasers can be tuned to different wavelengths all the
| way to x-rays.
| sroussey wrote:
| 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?
| thmsths wrote:
| 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 over and over to expose the waffer.
|
| This is a bit little injection molding: the mold is very
| expensive and made with a far better manufacturing process than
| the plastic pieces that it will eventually produce, but this is
| the price to pay for high volumes and low costs.
| stanleykm wrote:
| 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.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| 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?
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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).
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| It might be as simple as the fact that anything the electrons
| hit will pick up a huge electric charge. Now you've got ESD
| problems from hell, not to mention unwanted X-ray generation.
| gaze wrote:
| you can use an anti-charging layer for e-beam litho, that's
| not such a big deal. E-beam litho is just very slow. There
| are lithography techniques that use synchrotron sources like
| LIGA.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Ebeam is a pencil, photolithography is a printing press.
| spudnik wrote:
| RTFA. It's not about using electrons instead of UV
| kev009 wrote:
| Is the idea that this will scale? You can already build down to
| the atomic level with scanning tunneling microscopy (thanks IBM).
| itishappy wrote:
| Yes, electron-beam lithography is fantastic but also
| fantastically slow. Sorta like building a Lego model brick by
| brick vs layer by layer. It's still used for reticle
| fabrication and repair.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-beam_lithography
|
| Edit: Confused SEMs and STMs, but the principle described above
| applies to both.
| JimBlackwood wrote:
| Funny, we asked why they didn't use a cyclotron during an ASML
| visit
|
| Things would get a bit radioactive at those energies, though.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Lead is cheap, right?
|
| Very cool you visited ASML. Anything exciting/interesting you'd
| be willing to tell the class?
| elchananHaas wrote:
| 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 difficulties are?
| ur-whale wrote:
| https://archive.is/HKDho
| hengheng wrote:
| 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.
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