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I remember 15 years ago reading about EUV litography and a lot of people were saying that it looks like a pipe dream because they don't know of any way to produce a EUV light source strong enough, outside nuclear explosions and the like.

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It took 25 years to commercialize EUV. And that is from the point where a decision was made to industrialize it, not from the first scientific report about EUV radiation.

edit, see Zeiss page on EUV: https://www.zeiss.com/semiconductor-manufacturing-technology...

Some of people and organizations think in terms of decades and know that "soon" doesn't mean "tomorrow".

The world will not be free of short-term thinking until the last MBA is strangled with the entrails of the last PMP.

It looks like small piece of tin is where the magic begins [1]:

> An EUV system uses a high-energy laser that fires on a microscopic droplet of molten tin and turns it into plasma, emitting EUV light, which then is focused into a beam.

is the spectrum naturally pure, or is there some filtering/selection going on?

> The tricky thing with EUV light is that it’s absorbed by everything, even air. That’s why an EUV system has a large high-vacuum chamber in which the light can travel far enough to land on the wafer. The light is guided by a series of ultra-reflective mirrors

The system uses 1MW of power!

1. https://medium.com/@ASMLcompany/a-backgrounder-on-extreme-ul...

There's filtering, but the spectrum should have (near) discrete wavelengths that it emits at selectively

ahahah, that's not even the craziest thing about EUV. it's that the whole process has two actual laser shots, there is a preshot that heats the tin, forms a plasma that is shaped like a lens. and then comes the stronger, main shot.

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/aot-2017-0029... see pre-pulse part.

So it took about 10 years to get into production. OP isn't claiming it's impossible, just that it's far from being practical. You could definitely say that about EUV 15y ago

Yes, but do you remember all the BS PR releases about new "promising" techniques and materials that would "revolutionize" this or that process, that we read 15 and 20 and 30 years ago, that never materialized at all?

nanoimprint (heard it is making a comeback in Japan), x-ray litography, mass electron beam litography...

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