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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Is this giving away the keys to the kingdom?

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?

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Pretty much all of this has been public knowledge for a decade, or even longer.

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.

We are now two layers deep into the secret sauce. I want to know what the secret sauce of the measurement and calibration equipment is!

Hi, I work in laser measurement and calibration. There is no secret sauce; you take a physical phenomenon that translates optical power or energy into an electrical signal, measure that signal, then find the sensitivity value of that phenomenon and account for any other effects such as ambient temperature, fill factor, linearity, parasitics etc. and then prove that your calculations are correct by comparing them with NIST/PTB.

> The technology behind EUV is quite simple on paper, the hard part is getting it to work reliably.

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...

[2] http://earlytelevision.org/rca_tk41_restoration.html

> 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.

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!

> bomb-pumped x-ray lasers

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, ...)

Does anyone know why synchrotron light sources didn't/don't work out for EUV generation? Certainly they seem affordable at fab scale (which is mind-blowing in and of itself) so there must be some other reason.

Not sure. As an experiment, part of the Stanford Linear Accelerator was used to expose some wafers. It worked. Design paper from China on a synchrotron ring for EUV.[1] Note lack of info about ring dimensions. But it looks like hundreds of meters, at least. I think it's been tried with a large research synchrotron ring. But for now, apparently building a synchrotron is even more expensive than those AMSL nightmares. Any news on progress from the VCs? If someone can make this work cost-effectively it will be very profitable.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07323-z

That’s it in a nutshell. The current cost of a Synchrotron is more then the cost of the equivalent capability using non-synchrotron technologies.

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.

I don't think high vacuum is the main problem. I used to work closely with people who did serious high vacuum heavy lifting (with RHIC at Brookhaven) and they always gave off the impression that it's plenty difficult, but it's engineering-project difficult, not research-project difficult. There are solutions, they are understood, and they work at scale. Though they might not be pretty.

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?

>like hundreds of meters

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...

If feels a lot like hitting a sniper shot at insane ranges. You can know all of the theory, but actually doing it is a different ballgame

I doubt images alone are enough. China has had access to Russian jet engines for half a century and still struggles to produce their own.

Seems they are skimping on 3-D printers from AliExpress. :-)

If you give professional chef an elaborate dish and the recipe for it, will they be able to make exactly the same thing?

Probably not, in isolation.

But can the original chef that wrote the recipe produce the same thing several million or billion times a year?

We can't even replicate the F1 engine, or make new nukes anymore, and we have the recipe book and the chefs.

We can’t make F1s because the supply chains that made the materials and the parts no longer exist. We could try to approximate one with new materials and techniques, but it would not be an F1 - it’d be a design derived from it.

That’s the thing with the chefs - you can’t make a mammoth dish because there are no more mammoth to cook.

Yes they do, the supply chains still exist, we still use many of those alloys, etc. We still make rocket engines. In the F1's case we were just going too fast and didn't write things down.

In the nuclear weapons case we deliberately dismantled it.

> 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.

Chinese fighter jet engines are supposedly already better than the best Russian jet engines they've been given, though. General perception is that the WS-10 is generally better than the AL-31FN, hence why they started replacing AL-31s with WS-10s, both in domestic and export aircraft. The WS-15, if it does get even close to it's design goals, would be significantly better than any Russian engine.

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.

The recent leaked picture showing a J-20 with dual WS-15 puts their development on par with F-119/F-135. Lets see how quickly they can ramp up production. It seems they have fixed their supply chain issues.

It seems easier to make an engine that gives very high power at the expense of efficiency than an extremely efficient engine with reasonable power which is what airliners want.

In the Pacific, efficiency is the main goal for fighter jet engines. The goal of the WS-15 is to have F-35 level efficiency while being able to go relatively far in the supersonic regime and outrange every US plane.

And of course the engines for strategic lift planes are based around efficiency first.

I could believe the J-20 could match the F-35, and apparently the Air Force could believe it too because there’s also the F-22. And strategic lift planes use normal jet engines not supersonic ones so they face the same issue as Chinese airliners do.

The F-22's engine are not as good as the F-35 engine. It gets around that by simply being a larger plane and having a second engine.

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.

They recently got the WS-20 and WS-15 which puts them very close to US engines.

A story about Dutch history:

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.

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