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Discussion (34 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The more straightforward video of ASML EUV is from Branch Education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2482h_TNwg
Because that vid gives an overview of the whole machine, it gives context to what each scientist is talking about in the Veritasium interviews.
Makes one wonder: Would we be much better off of worse off if we reshaped society to do more of things, where a new technology is unlikely to work but highly beneficial in the limits? Would we sooner have 10 additional ASMLs or waste a lot of resources?
As a software engineer by trade, the above parable communicates to me two very important things and little else by comparison: that the machines are ultimately fragile and nowhere near "optimised", since the complexity is by own admission substantial to put it mildly; the machine is not a commodity, exactly, one of the million pieces breaking subtly likely renders it inoperable; its cost is proportional to its complexity (read: astronomic); by mere fact it's a focal point of geopolitics only supports the rest of the argument it's a machine of current stone age much like siege engines were at some point the closely guarded secret win-or-lose multiplers of feudal culture.
I mean it's certainly interesting to read about the complexity, but reducing the complexity and commoditising the whole thing is what's really going to be impressive I think :-)
I am probably speaking out against the nerd in us, and none of what I said should detract from enjoying the article or the subject, it's just that I think complexity here is the giveaway of us not having conquered UVL exactly, not quite yet :-) Or maybe we lack the right materials which would allow us to reduce the machine or make it less complex or prone to calibration related errors.
What is the corresponding revolution in chip production? I imagine something like FPGAs for litography - a wafer that can somehow work on another wafer in a sandwich-like configuration. Such a process could potentially improve on each iteration and thus get very good, very fast.
Either China will catch up on this or that particular technology will become obsolete. But it is certain that they won't stay behind forever (measured in a small number of decades at most).
whatever many secrets are involved, information wants to be free and it's hard to believe that others won't figure it out.
by the time they do catch up we better be steps ahead. what's after EUV?
I can understand why you can't just take one apart and copy it.
There's (apparently) 4 decades of accumulated cutting edge scientific research that has gone into these machines.
I suspect the machinery, process and human expertise required to simply produce the parts required for these machines is the real moat (oh and I guess the US-led export controls too).
The build tolerances for components are incredible. There are 11 primary mirrors in an EUV machine, each one has something like 100 coats of ultra-pure materials that are precisely deposited in picometer-thick layers with tolerances in the nanometers, across a 1-meter wide curved surface.
Then you have to position the mirrors perfectly inside the machine, again with tolerances in the nanometers.
So even if you know what you need to do, having the equipment and expertise to do it is a different thing.
And that's just one part of the 100,000+ parts that make up an EUV machine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Interconnection
I mean we're not talking AMD FX and Core 2 Duo here, it's Raptor Lake and Zen 3, it's perfectly viable and still being sold in droves right now.
There’s also the issue of older process nodes not being profitable enough anymore, which explaines why at the height of the chip supply crunch older ARM chips were in short supply but there was ample stock of the 20nm feature-sized RP2040.
I don't think I'm being entirely hyperbolic when I say the consumer market only exists to put devices that can connect to and feed the datacenter loads into the general populations hands.
Surely you don't believe that the entire chip industry had not thought of "wait what if we just make the chips bigger".