Friday is here, and the 'Weekend Science Bite' corner is back — number 70 💫
This time: a $400 million machine, chip manufacturing, and the breakthrough opening a window to a new future for the field.
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At the heart of the global semiconductor industry, a massive $400 million machine is at work (you can see it in the video).
Only one company in the world manufactures this machine — it's based in the Netherlands, and its name is ASML.
Each unit takes about a year and a half to produce, and it's so large that it must be shipped in parts aboard cargo aircraft to the facility where it will be assembled.
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This machine produces chips using photolithography, and the process is so complex that it is considered the most intricate machine ever built by human hands.
Its operating principle consists of several steps.
In the first step, a "mask" is created in which the chip's pattern appears as tiny slits.
The mask is positioned above a silicon wafer coated with a material called photoresist.
Ultraviolet light shines through the pattern etched into the mask, and mirrors focus it onto the photoresist, where it chemically alters only the regions that correspond to the slits in the pattern.
In the next step, the silicon wafer is heated and rinsed with a base that removes all the photoresist that was exposed to the laser. The chip is then exposed to electrically charged plasma, which etches away the silicon in the areas no longer coated with photoresist.
The resulting silicon pattern forms one perfect layer of the chip; multiple such layers stacked on top of one another produce the final processor.
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The laser beam is built from a wave of light.
The shorter the wavelength, the smaller the lines it can etch.
ASML's machine is capable of generating extreme ultraviolet (EUV) rays with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers (one billionth of a meter), and by focusing the beam and applying sophisticated techniques, the company succeeds in etching exceptionally small transistors with it.
In this context, it's worth noting that although the latest manufacturing process is called "2 nanometer," the actual size of the transistors is significantly larger. The term 2 nanometer expresses the theoretical performance of a single transistor layer at that size, but in practice the chip is built from multiple stacked layers that achieve comparable performance even with larger transistors.
Light at this wavelength is generated from tiny tin droplets fired into a vacuum chamber.
A first laser pulse strikes the droplets and flattens them, and a second, high-intensity pulse rapidly heats them into a plasma that emits the extreme ultraviolet light.
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A small startup (Substrate) is challenging both the manufacturing process and ASML's absolute monopoly in the market, with a process based on X-rays, whose wavelength is significantly shorter than that of light.
The X-rays are generated by accelerating particles in an accelerator and illuminating the photoresist to create the chip pattern.
This approach eliminates the complex process of generating extreme ultraviolet rays from tin droplets, and opens up the potential for manufacturing smaller transistors at significantly lower cost.
Shabbat Shalom 😊
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Video credit: CNBC
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