A $ 150 million machine that keeps Moore’s Law alive

In 1965, Gordon Moore was one of the electronics engineers and founders Intel, he wrote an article to do 35th anniversary number Electronics, a trade magazine that contained a note that has since taken on a life of its own. In the article, Moore noted that the number of components in a silicon chip had doubled every year so far, and predicted that the trend would continue.

A decade later, Moore revised his estimate for more than two years. The progress of Moor’s law has been questioned in recent years, although new manufacturing advances and innovations in chip design have roughly kept it on track.

EUV uses exceptional engineering to reduce the wavelength of light used to make chips, and should help keep it in that line. Technology will be key to more advanced smartphones and cloud computing, as well as key areas of emerging technology Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and robotics. “The death of Moore’s law has been excessive,” Alamos says. “I think it’s going to last quite a while.”

In between last chip shortage, caused by the economic shock waves of the pandemic, ASML products have become a geopolitical struggle between the US and China, and Washington has a high priority to block China’s access to machines. The U.S. government has successfully pressured the Dutch not to issue the necessary export licenses to send the machines to China, and ASML says it has not sent anyone to the country.

“You can’t make cutting-edge chips without an ASML machine,” he says Will Hunt, A research analyst at Georgetown University, studies the geopolitics of chip manufacturing. “There are a lot of people with years and years of experimenting with things and it’s very difficult to get access to that.”

Each component that fits into an EUV machine is described as “surprisingly sophisticated and extraordinarily complex”.

Making microchips requires the most advanced engineering the world has ever seen. A chip begins as a cylindrical part of crystalline silicon, split into thin leaves, then covered with layers of light-sensitive material and repeatedly exposed to model light. Parts of silicon that do not touch light are chemically etched to reveal the intricate details of a chip. Each ostia is sliced ​​to make a lot of chips.

Reducing the components of a chip remains the safest way to extract more computational power from a piece of silicon, as electrons pass more efficiently through smaller electronic components and increasing the ability to incorporate more components into a chip.

Many innovations have followed Moore’s law, including new chip and component designs. In May, for example, IBM showed a new type of transistorinserted as a tape inside the silicon, which would allow more components to be inserted into a chip without decreasing the resolution of the lithograph.

But reducing the wavelength of light used in chip manufacturing has helped drive miniaturization and progress since the 1960s, and is key to further progress. Machines that used visible light were replaced by those that use almost ultraviolet, and as a result, systems that used deep ultraviolet were given smaller and smaller features to record on chips.

A consortium of companies such as Intel, Motorola and AMD began studying the EUV in the 1990s as the next step in lithography. ASML was introduced in 1999 and, as the leading manufacturer of lithography technology, tried to develop the first EUV machines. Extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV for short, allows the use of a much shorter wavelength of light (13.5 nanometers) than the previous ultraviolet lithography method (193 nanometers).

But it has taken decades to pose engineering challenges. Creating a clear EUV is in itself a big problem. ASML’s method is to direct high-power lasers to tin droplets 50,000 times per second to generate high-intensity light. The lenses absorb EUV frequencies, so the system uses incredibly accurate mirrors coated with special material. Inside the ASML machine, the EUV light bounces off several mirrors before passing through the lattice as it moves with nanoscale precision to align the silicon layers.

“Honestly, no one wants to use EUV,” says David Kanter, a chip analyst at Real World Technologies. “It’s only 20 years late and it’s 10 times bigger than the budget. But if you want to build very compact structures, it’s the only tool you have.”