The World's Most Important Machine

20 insights saved from this video by @technology

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EUV’s second pre-pulse further rarifies the flattened tin droplet before the final pulse ionizes it into more light.
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EUV mirrors needed bumps no thicker than 2.3 silicon atoms, versus roughly 4,000 silicon atoms on a household mirror.
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Scaled to Earth’s size, the largest bump on the lithography machine’s mirrors would be no thicker than a playing card.
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Scaled to the world, a high-NA mirror’s tallest bump would be playing-card thick. A low-NA mirror’s would be roughly millimeter-sized.
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ASML’s high-NA EUV machine costs north of 350 million euros. One machine costs more than many skyscrapers.
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EUV manufacturing coordinates 5,000 suppliers, 100,000 parts, 3,000 cables, 40,000 bolts, and two kilometers of hosing.
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A single nanometer of tin debris on the collector mirror can take the mirror out of commission.
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The only machine enabling the next stage of chip miniaturization costs about $400 million.
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The Engineering Test Stand fired a 1,700-watt laser into xenon gas to produce 13.4-nanometer light.
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High-NA projection optics shrink a chip pattern eight times vertically and four times horizontally.
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Once EUV physics worked, the real battle became solving the vast engineering problems of reliable factory operation.
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Kinoshita pursued x-ray lithography while widespread skepticism dismissed his results. Send this to someone who refuses to quit.
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A 76-layer tungsten-carbon mirror reflected 6% of 4.48-nanometer x-rays, proving x-rays could be reflected at all.
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By 1993, x-ray lithography had an international conference in Japan and a new name: extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV.
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EUV’s one-nanometer overlay budget is divided among components, leaving every subsystem only a fraction of the allowable error.
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ASML invested in high-NA EUV before basic EUV became operational, betting on smaller features before success was secured.
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X-rays around 10 nanometers print smaller features, but air absorbs them, forcing chipmakers into vacuums without ordinary lenses.
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ASML customers challenged its credibility after promised improvements missed previously announced timelines.
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Molybdenum-beryllium mirrors offered higher reflectivity, but toxic, difficult-to-handle beryllium made silicon-molybdenum practical.
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Smaller transistors make chips faster and more powerful by shortening signal paths and packing more transistors into the same area.

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