Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “You Didn’t Build your PC… This Did.”.
We’Re here at asml in San Diego, where they have possibly the most advanced machine on the planet inside the processors of your phone and computer, are billions and billions of transistors that are only nanometers in size. How can they possibly create something? That’S that small, by shooting, molten tin with the world’s most powerful CO2 laser 50 000 times a second yeah in here they design and build the tools that are used by chip makers to build the most advanced processors in the world. And I cannot wait to show you everything minus whatever their lawyers cut. What they can’t cut, though, is this segue to our sponsor, build Redux with simple to navigate customization options and competitive pricing compared to building a PC yourself, build Redux will help.
You dominate your favorite games with the perfect PC for you and not another different person. They can get their own check them out of the link below when you hear AMD or Nvidia are producing seven nanometer chips. It is really easy, just be like well yeah.
They always keep on making smaller transistors every single year and Technology goes on, but how the heck do they make a transistor that small with great difficulty? The whole process is kind of like a big overhead projector from school there’s a light source that goes through the image that you want to project and then there’s some mirrors and lenses that make sure everything arrives on the screen in Focus. Only difference is that for lithography, the light source is one of the world’s most powerful lasers and the screen is silicon. Since the early 2000s chip makers used 193 nanometer deep UV light provided by an argon, fluoride laser, even in 2001, they were already making transistors smaller than 193 nanometers. How the heck can you etch something? That’S smaller than the wavelength of the light that you’re using the most important equation for all of this is rayleigh’s resolution criteria.
This equation here is what tells us the small, less detail that is possible to create for a given Optical system and wavelength over the next 20 years through more advanced Optics Imaging through water, on top of the wafer printing, a single layer multiple times and using strange. Looking chip patterns, chip makers were able to continually make smaller and smaller transistors. At some point, though, the wavelength is going to be a problem, and if you don’t address it, you might, I don’t know, get stuck making 14 nanometer chips for the next seven years now, creating light with a smaller wavelength than 193 nanometers is not very difficult. For instance, they do it all the time in x-ray machines at hospitals. The problem, though, is those x-rays famously go through everything, including mirrors and lenses, not fantastic. If you plan on using an optical system now, it turns out 13.5 nanometers or extreme ultraviolet is basically the smallest wavelength.
You can use that’s still mostly bounces off of mirrors, producing this 13.5 nanometer euv light, though, is what the incredibly smart folks here at San Diego have figured out. There are multiple ways to create 13 and a half nanometer light, but the best way is to blast tin with the laser and turn it into plasma. The problem with just pointing a powerful laser at a block of tin, though, is that, along with e UV light, you’ve also just uh. Well, you blasted tin, with a laser there’s enough liquid and gaseous tin, flying all over the place to ruin just about anything, let alone a lithography machine that can be taken down by a single piece of dander, since shooting a block of tin was out of the Equation the folks at asml had the insane idea to fire liquid tin droplets at over 275 bar and then shoot it with an insanely powerful laser twice.
The first laser pulse is called the pre-pulse, which hits the tin droplet just hard enough to change it from a spherical droplet into more of a pancake shape, which maximizes the amount of 13 and a half nanometer light produced emitting a bunch of that sweet, sweet euv. The plasma is made right at the focus point of this concave mirror, which is specially layered and coated to ensure only 13 and a half nanometer light plus or minus two percent gets reflected and sends 150 watts or more of euv into the guts of the lithography Machine anyway, let’s go look at that big ass laser before that, though, I need to get all suited up and a lot of factories you put on PPE to protect yourself from the machines, although here are protecting the machines from us just a single hair blow a Laser up terrible time make sure arms don’t hit the ground. Oh rad, these shoes are, I mean, but clearly there are they’re all do you imagine if we call it a hole Andrew set that back to Sierra? Oh, my God, this entire room is a laser made by Trump in Germany that powers the euv light source when the tin is shot into the chamber. There are multiple detectors that need to figure out the location and velocity of the droplets with micrometer and nanosecond Precision.
This location data is used to time when the laser fires, which starts right here now. This is the seed laser, which is only a couple hundred Watts from here. It goes through a bunch of isolation Optics and then it ends up in a power amplifier. This guy right here on its own, this power amplifier, can operate as a 25 kilowatt continuous laser, and it was actually designed to weld cars together on production lines. Here, though, they have excited the CO2. So when the source laser gets fired, the amount of photons gets massively multiplied like 10 to the 11 times.
They then run the beam through three more power amplification stages, just to make sure that they can truly and completely annihilate some tin. In total, this laser delivers 25 kilowatts, but that power is average pulses over several seconds instantaneously. It’S about 20 megawatts of power here, the laser and the light source are on the same level, so you can see it goes across here down and over, but in an actual Fab, this laser would likely be stored in the basement and then pumped several floors up To this Source, there is a critical problem with this approach, though, on their own the four power amplifiers, don’t care, which way the light is traveling and will very happily amplify. A signal going in reverse tin is also quite reflective. So when the early prototypes, some of the laser bounced off got Amplified by all of these amplifiers and then lit the source laser on fire, not the desired outcome, to say the least, to overcome this, they have employed literally every passive and active isolation technique to to Ensure that no reflected laser light makes its way back through the amplification chain. Here we can see the liquid tin delivery system.
The tin travels through this tube under immense pressure and is shot through a minus dual nozzle at 275 bar on the tip of the nozzle. Is a tiny piezoelectric Crystal that vibrates in such a way to ensure that the droplets come out in a very specific strand that later combines into droplets that are perfect for laser sniping? This entire process happens, 50, 000 times every single second, so right, here’s the actual, droplet generator unit. So on the top you can see the heater and then this big old gun barrel.
Looking thing is where all of the liquid tin gets shot out of. Originally, they used to use a solid piece of tin and heat it up before shooting, but that required turning the machine off to reload it every so often huge problem. Now the whole system uses liquid tin, which can be much more easily replenished for extremely low down time, since it’s euv lithography machines are the most expensive parts of the Fab about 150 to 200 million dollars a pop. They are designed to be the bottleneck of the entire operation. This means anytime, the eub machine is down, the entire Fab goes down and heaps of money is lost for hundreds of millions of dollars of investment.
It makes sense that these things need to work 24 hours. A day seven days a week and all maintenance downtime needs to be planned in advance. Currently asml has achieved nearly 90 uptime, with their euv machines and they’re on track for 95 uptime by 2025.. What we see behind me right here is the source, so this right here in an actual Fab, is the light source for the whole lithography machine. So right here that right there is the Metrology unit. So that’s these.
How much light they’re making the quality of it? They can test it out, see how well they’re doing, but normally this will be sent straight into the guts of the big old euv machine behind me, they’re doing droplet generation qualification. So that means that they’re shooting the tin out here and having a look at it to make sure everything is working just fine, and it also means that we can see the tin that’s going through. It just looks like a tiny little spider web, but all of that is just tiny, tiny little pieces of tin whip Micron yeah yeah are we allowed to say that to qualify the droplet generator, they have a camera there with the shutter speed time with the droplets That are coming in, so we can see these two dots right here and as long as No Nonsense around it she’s good to go. They look at this for four hours. If there’s any problems, then back to the lab, of course the problems aren’t over. Yet we just hit a piece of tin with a laser hard enough to make it hotter than the surface of sun, and it only takes a couple shots before everything gets too hot and everything’s covered in a mess of tin. Now The Collector mirror is water cooled, but that has more to do with temperature stability than the heat of the plasma to deal with the heat instead of water cooling, they pump hydrogen gas through the floor.
This hydrogen absorbs the energy of the laser interaction and then gets sucked out the top of the machine, along with all the bits of unvaporized tin. Two new problems, though first, is that the more hydrogen that enters the vessel, the more energy you lose meaning you can only use the exact amount of hydrogen that you need or you’re going to lose a bunch of efficiency and as a bonus when the hydrogen is Close to the tin when it gets laced, the H2 molecules get ripped apart into two hydrogen-free radicals, which are then scattered across the innards of the source. Those hydrogen free radicals hit some of the liquid tin.
It will start to bubble and explode so more liquid, tin everywhere and a terrible time. Basically, the hydrogen cleanup team needs to do a really good job to ensure that everything gets carried out quickly and completely for your 1.3 million dollar mirror will have a very expensive trip to the cleanup room. Everything we’ve talked about so far, though, is only the first step of the lithography machine, the light bulb so to speak in the past for deep UV light. They would use a series of lenses to properly Focus the light, but euv just gets absorbed by lenses and also most mirrors to overcome this Zeiss created the world’s flattest and probably most expensive Mirrors by layering silicon and molybdenum. They are able to bounce almost 70 percent of the incoming light, meaning the system needs to use as few mirrors as possible to maintain high efficiency just delivering a circle of light, though wasn’t enough.
Some features can be better etched by using a different pattern. So using an array of micrometers is how they delivered that in the past, how they do it for euv um. I don’t know they wouldn’t tell me for IP reasons.
The light then bounces off of the reticle, which is four times larger than the Target and makes its way onto the target, which is held on a magnetically levitating platform. Well, that is getting printed. Second, wafer is measured to ensure it is placed with nanometer accuracy. So the downtime between prints is only a couple of milliseconds. The process then continues with each print either the positive or negative. The image is imprinted. Wafer is then polished to remove the photo resist and the whole thing starts over again as soon as possible. They will move from euv to an older process node, not just because the older nodes are cheaper, but also because, at the end of the day, we need to end up at the size of a wire.
Sadly, you can’t solder to seven nanometer here they aren’t just researching how to build euv light sources, though they’re building the final components that will be used in production at tsmc, Samsung, inteller micro. A lot of the components are assembled By Hand by highly skilled technicians, although over time, each process is slowly being automated to take human error out of the equation over 40 percent of the parts get recycled and reconditioning here, which makes sense, given that even the housings Of the components can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and they take care of even just routine maintenance yeah. It turns out that they empty the tin into these super cheap water bottles that are just off AliExpress wow. That is heavy.
I can’t pick that up. In theory, we could probably just hook it up to an LTT water bottle, although I’d recommend just sticking to water ltdstore.com from here. The source is shipped to the Netherlands, where it is assembled and tested with all of the other euv scanner components from across the world. The final euv machine is then shipped to the customer via three full 147s and 20 transport trucks, where, hopefully, it will crank out Cutting Edge chips for years to come in the future.
Asml will start shipping High N8 UV machines, so this is the source for one of those right here and the concept is similar to what we’ve already seen, but with improved Optics and reliability based on improvements they found over the last couple of years. It is likely euv will be the last wavelength required for lithography, since, with future improvements, the limiting factor of the resolution will become the size of atoms from there. The only real option is quantum, but that’s a discussion for another day anyway, huge thanks to Ryan Alex for spending a bunch of time with us and answering all of my dumb questions as well as Abby, Andre Leanne, Julia Pete and everyone else here at asml San, Diego, oh and of course I couldn’t forget to thank our sponsor ground news. Their app and website are for anyone who’s wanting to see every side of every news story.
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