I'm not an expert on this but feel like a 250w light is not the major driver of cost in EUV? Or am I misunderstanding this?
They have uptime only about 80%. They need to be stopped, calibrated and maintained frequently.
They do not go obsolete quicly. They are constantly upgraded. 10-15 year old fabs and machines are still running all over the world. There are 1000 nm, 90nm, 40 nm, 14 nm fabs still running. High-end is not all of semiconductor industry.
https://zeptobars.com/en/read/AD9361-SDR-Analog-Devices-DAC-...
Relevant quotes (and the current retail price if anything is higher now then when the article was written):
“ Retail price of AD9361 at distributes is 275$, volume price from manufacturer is 175$.
That is quite an impressive added value! For 1,68$ of manufacturing cost we are getting 173,32$ of added value! Even Intel with their x86 or drug cartels could NOT do business like that.”
Of course, the actual margin needs to take into account NRE and other costs (and the above link does get into that) but, in this case, the manufacturing is a tiny sliver of the costs.
I assume the real saving is on the cost of the machine in the first place, and again relying on my AI buddy Claude:
Let me break down the costs of both Nanoimprint Lithography (NIL) and Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines:
NIL Machine Cost:
Basic NIL systems: $1-3 million Advanced NIL systems (like those from Canon/Molecular Imprints): $10-15 million
EUV Machine Cost:
Current ASML EUV systems (like the NXE:3400C): Approximately $150-200 million per unit Latest generation ASML EUV systems (NXE:3600D): Over $300 million per unit Installation and support infrastructure can add $30-50 million
**
So, looks like $200M+ saving going with NIL vs EUV.
You already lose most of the input power in the pulsed laser. Then only a fraction of the energy of the light hitting the tin is converted to EUV light with the correct wavelength. Finally the EUV light has to be focused on the mask through complicated optics, which is notoriously difficult for EUV light.
I guess, there are other sources of inefficiencies, that I forgot.
“We pulse lasers in sync with dispensing droplets of molten tin to produce light that doesn’t exist outside of stars, then we use mirrors with a sub-angstrom surface roughness to precisely direct it onto wafers.”
Not to mention the fact that this is happening, IIRC, thousands of times per second, and the tool has to take the wafer’s topography into account to focus the beam. Honestly, EUV litho makes every other technology you could describe sound like child’s play.
30 years ago I think you could have gotten any number of experts to explain why both EUV lithography and modern disk drives are impossible.
It's clearly some people that are very smart that can only be explained by aliens
From what I understand, tin-based sources are easier to work with because they are point-like. All the energy is produced from a tiny droplet. Synchrotron sources produce much wider beams, that need to be re-focused properly.
Same reason it's called "euv" and not "soft x-ray".
A lot of stuff simply does not require the most advanced chips.
FPA-1200NZ2C came out 2015-2016. Press release from a sale 2017 https://global.canon/en/news/2017/20170720.html
And one cannot simply substitute an optical lithography with a nano imprint machine without redesigning some part of the process (etch, metrology etc.).
Investing R&D resources for a (best case) 10% reduction in costs while still having a decent probability of failure in a big but declining node is not worth it.
But towards the end of the article they talk of targeting 8nm line width in 2028, which is impressive. Maybe this time around NIL actually becomes real for high-end processes?
(It's licensed CC-BY so this should be allowed, and I like having videos like this on YouTube where I can easily watch them from anywhere and add them to my playlists.)
I wonder what the environmental impact of this is versus extreme ultraviolet. Although they mention "cost of ownership" and throughput, I wonder if this has any hidden implications.
The United States alone consumes about 25 000 TWh "primary energy" pear year (includes electricy, transport, and heating) [2]. This means that in the extreme case, EUV machines consume 54 TWh / 25 000 TWh = 0.2% of total energy! In comparison, 27% of total U.S. energy consumption was used for transporting people and goods around in the US [3].
And I made the example here before that if you are considering to turn off your phone in order to save battery at the risk of taking an accidental detour, then the decision is simple. Keep the phone. Driving one kilometer extra consumes multiple orders of magnitude more energy than powering a phone for hours. I think this idea holds in many more cases. Video meetings for example can save people from traveling all over the world. This saves energy and time as well.
So I would say please go full power on chip manufacturing. It's way better for the environment (and often saves people time) than deciding to stop innovation and instead keep transporting everything around physically. I'm not saying transport is bad. I'm saying that standing in the way of innovation as an argument for better "environmental impact" is nonsensical.
[1]: https://www.techinsights.com/blog/euv-lithography-power-hung...
[2]: https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/united-states
[3]: https://www.eia.gov/kids/using-and-saving-energy/transportat...
The flip side of this is that chips becoming so cheap has caused a huge increase in e-waste. Basically everything has a computer inside it (think smart toothbrushes, fridges, toys...) and it usually leads to shorter product lifetimes. Manufacturers drop support for their apps and shut down cloud services sometimes as quickly as two years after manufacture, so things are thrown away. Smart gadgets are also generally more prone to breaking due to having more, more complex more and sensitive parts (no way that 10c MCU in a smart toaster is survivng 10 years of hot-cold cycles).
If chips were more expensive, we wouldn't waste machine time on dual-core mediatek SOCs for 100 € smartphones with a "life expectantly" of less than two years. Manufacturers would make expensive and quality phones and those that can't afford them (I've been there) would buy older models used or refurbished. Longer product lifespans, more reuse, less waste.
I think it sounds somewhat nice in theory to make lifestyle changes, and sure it helps, but it's not a solution. It's like if you are in financial trouble. Sure you can decide to not spend any money anymore. That definitely helps. But if you sell your car to save money and then cannot make it to job interviews anymore then you saved too much. You need to focus on getting money (and maybe spending it in the process) AND saving money. Focusing only on saving money is a losing strategy. Same with climate. Focusing only on using less energy is a losing strategy. Sometimes you need to spend energy to save energy in the future.
As a bare minimum, many people can choose to take more environmentally friendly vacations. You don't have to go on a cruise, and yet that's a booming industry. You don't have to fly across an ocean. Almost everybody who does these things has the option to go on perfectly fine, perhaps even better, less carbon intensive alternative vacations.
And yes, there are people who consciously make that lifestyle change. Not enough, of course. But only a Sith deals in absolutes.
No, the solution must be technical while people are allowed to maintain most of the comfort they are used to. Anything else and you will simply not be able to convince people to do so even if that means burning the world down.
I totally agree that we need technical solutions. We have no hope without them. But it's also naive to think that endless growth without lifestyle changes is possible.
That said, if you really think about it, the most important lifestyle change of all is happening, and quite dramatically so: People are having fewer children.
It's effectively mass subsidization for bad behavior at the expense of people who are altruistic. I don't see how it can be a winning strategy in the long run.
For just a second, let's set aside our hopes and idealism, because I do realize how distasteful this world view may be.
If the best hope for the environment is that altruistic people suffer a disadvantage so that everyone (including defectors who don't want to help anyone and only help themselves) can win, how is that not a strong long term advantage for anti-social behavior?
"Great, don't take that plane ride, stop burning fossil fuels. More for me until we run out! I can even afford to have more kids because I don't care how impactful they are, while you responsibly go extinct."
Feels like a losing battle, and not a fun way to lose either. I suspect that we all know, despite our hopes, that eight billion people will not decide to collectively give up their own happiness for the betterment of billions of strangers they aren't related to.
It's not enough, but it's necessary to limit CO2 emissions during the transition.
Hopefully for those prices it will still let you send a fax if you run out of resin.
Al Gore pushed for The Partnership for a Next Generation Vehicle. They say the only vehicle the PNGV produced was the Prius, and Toyota was not eligible to participate. But they freaked out because the Americans were taking it seriously and created a dream team by recruiting their best people into a new program. Only it was all for show. So TM ended up with a serious car and everyone else with demonstrators.