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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

A tidbit, a one of more lunatical proposal for the next gen fab design is to build it around a multimegawatt cyclotron, and have the light source problem "solved for good"

The genuine problem with tin plasma laser is its power efficiency. An early adopter runs can bare with 0.02% energy efficiency, but imagine, say, a few 20 line fabs and their power consumption.

Another very important advantage of this design would be getting a more stable, easily tunable, and more narrowband light source. Tin plasma has around 1nm deviation in its spectrum, while a cyclotron can get to picometres on an arbitrary wavelength.

And with all above, you get a supremely tempting option to try diffractive optics, and do away with all geometry imposes nonsense of EUV reflective optics...

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High level descriptions of semiconductor fabrication is what scifi tech porn wants to be. Throwing an accelerator in there doesn't seem out of place. I wouldn't be surprised if they already used them for some other purposes.

Particle accelerators are used, though I'm not aware of anyone doing so for production semiconductors. They are used for doping and someone was using one for cleaving solar cells off of a silicon ingot, so there would be no kerf losses.

My father used to work for Intel, back in the '80s and '90s - he's mentioned this proposal before. Apparently this is not even remotely a new idea, and even back in the late 90s, they were expecting to have to move to this model eventually.

I had a similar idea of using synchrotron to generate very low wavelength light for lithography... I guess costs are an issue!

The "lighbulb" in 3400 costs as much as a small research synchrotron already

What's 3400?

https://www.asml.com/-/media/asml/files/products/twinscan-nx...

"User Interface LINUX Architecture The system is delivered with proprietary ASML TWINSCAN software based on the Linux/Voyager operating system. Separate computing hosts are used for data access and scanner control offering the following automation interfaces: SECS, EDI, and EDA."

A 26x33 mm die would yield 86E9 transistor. Pretty impressive.

Not a useful comparison. A single neuron is far better networked to its neighbors and far more complex/nonlinear than a transistor. There are already chips out there with 1e11 transistors, but they don't run "ai" even a little bit.

Assuming you need something like 1e5 transistors to approximate one neuron, you'd need like 100m^2 of die area and interconnect to actually emulate a brain.

And you would still lag due to speed of light issues.

If we get plasma wakefield accelerators working better we could build a table top free electron laser and just go with that!

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