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Is this description of the difficulties of EUV lithography http://semiaccurate.com/2013/02/13/euv-moves-forward-two-ste... fairly accurate or not? It's certainly very funny.

I also note that Seymour Cray wanted to do gallium arsenide CPUs back in the late '80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW7j2ipE2Ck .



Yes, I think it's accurate. As the article says, the #1 problem with EUV is low power output. Especially with less sensitive photoresists (another problem unmentioned), today's 30 W output is not enough to churn out 100-200 wafers per hour.

By the way, an interesting alternative to blasting drops of molten tin in vacuum is to just build a multimillion dollar synchrotron and use its x-rays for lithography in a fab. This has a whole bunch of other problems, but it's an idea that engineers are seriously considering.

Most of my knowledge comes from my friend who used to work on the problem of inspecting x-ray masks.


why the jump from 193nm light to 13.5nm light with nothing in between? Would 50nm light for instance basically be exactly as hard as 13.5nm so you just go with the smallest possible?


I'm just guessing here. Current technology uses all sorts of tricks to focus/manipulate/use 193nm light so that you can build something smaller than the size of wavelength. However many of these tricks don't work with EUV or bigger but smaller than current light because it has to be done in a vacuum. So basicly you have to go even smaller to be better.


Semiconductor manufacturing is always ripe for absurdist humor, as semiconductor manufacturing is itself absurd :)




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