Tour of an ASML machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfU20SAR21A
My problem with access to very smart people is usually to be able to ask the right questions not that they couldn't answer.
Is the blur on the videos enough to keep the proprietary components concealed? Seems like a state actor could easily reverse this filter and learn the underlying shapes.
How much isn't revealed by this tour? This seems like it's giving away quite a lot of the EUV process. Or has all of the content of the video been publicly known (or stolen previously)?
I get that this might excite young people into entering the field, but if the US is trying to gatekeep advanced processors, this feels like showing off a lot of the secret sauce.
How long do we think it'll take a foreign actor to replicate EUV, and how far along do we think we'll be into the next process by then?
But can the original chef that wrote the recipe produce the same thing several million or billion times a year?
That’s the thing with the chefs - you can’t make a mammoth dish because there are no more mammoth to cook.
In the nuclear weapons case we deliberately dismantled it.
I'd say that is actually a good thing. Nukes are meant not to be used. They are a deterrent, so it's important they exist, that they are functional, and that you are willing to use them to hit hard against an aggressor. MAD kept us alive until now.
They seem to be struggling a lot with airliner engines, yes, but they've only recently even considered making them. Even then, the WS-20 has entered service, and if it matches claimed specifications, it's as good as anything Russia has either.
And of course the engines for strategic lift planes are based around efficiency first.
Both modern fighter jets and airliners use turbofan engines, the difference is the bypass ratio (hence the size of the bypass blades). For both low and high bypass, Chinese engines are supposedly better than Russian engines. They aren't better than Western engines but they're not that far apart. As far as airliners, the airliner engine is a different design from the WS-20 because of different requirements. It started development far later than the WS-20 and it has been flight tested after only 5 years, which isn't bad at all.
The technology behind EUV is quite simple on paper, the hard part is getting it to work reliably. It would take you years to reverse engineer it even if you had unlimited physical access to a working machine, and all the truly secret sauce is in all the measurement and calibration equipment around it.
EUV machines are a terrible approach to the problem made to work through a huge amount of effort. Look at the size of those things. All to get a little burst of soft X-rays and focus it on a mask and wafer. With a light source that works by using lasers to vaporize a droplet of tin falling in vacuum. Creating an internal mess that has to be cleaned up.
For a decade, people in wafer fab hoped there would be some other way to do this. Small synchrotrons. X-ray lasers. E-beam machines. But those approaches all fizzled out. So what ought to be a physics experiment run occasionally was hammered into being a production technology.
Examples of a commercial technology that hard which went mainstream are rare. There was the image orthicon.[1] That's a TV camera tube. Previous technologies needed very bright light. Zworklin's iconoscope accumulated the image over an entire frame time, but photon to electron conversion was very inefficient. Farnsworth's image dissector had much more efficient photon to electron conversion, because it had a photomultiplier built into the tube, but only the light received from the pixel currently under the scanning beam contributed to the output - there was no full-frame accumulation.
So RCA developed the image orthicon, which combined both of those technologies. It was insanely complicated and expensive. The tube alone cost about US$10,000 in the 1950. Color required three tubes. The tubes required something like ten different power supplies, and control and alignment required hundreds of adjustments. Here's someone trying to restore one.[2] All those racks of equipment for one camera.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Image_orthic...
Now I'm imaging some retro-50s (ala Fallout) setting where the fancy chipmaking machines use bomb-pumped x-ray lasers. Swords into ploughshares taken too far? Maybe, but who cares!
For this to make sense you would need to expose multiple wafers on each detonation. But then you would need one mask per wafer, and masks are even harder to make than a chip (electron beam, ...)
It might seem crazy but it turns out Synchrotrons are pretty rare machines too… and they are less “operationalised” in an industrial sense than the crazy tech inside the EUV machines… between the vacuum levels needed and the various linear or circular accelerator technologies available, at the end of the day it’s just way more of a pain in the ass to maintain a large industrially pure vacuum machine operating at continuous round the clock fashion. which might seem nuts but talk to anyone who’s works with high vacuum systems about vacuum purity, out gassing and contamination and yeah… it will make sense pretty quickly.
No, I'm guessing it's something else. I can't imagine complexity is the issue, given the nightmare that is the ASML scanner, so I can only guess that some property of the light generated by synchrotrons is troublesome and not easily correctable.
If that's not the case... perhaps there really might be a business opportunity here?
IIRC Tsinghua SSMB ring design has circumference of ~140m for kW EUV light source. My understanding, at least how SSMB was/is being sold is: storage ring technology mature, price per tool / light source will be relative low.
E: tsinghua ssmb update from last year
https://conference-indico.kek.jp/event/160/contributions/287...
In the sixteenth century Dutch merchants managed to bribe a Portuguese captain into drawing them some maps. This is why the Netherlands managed to reach Indonesia on the second expedition instead of taking the 50 years it took Portugal.