I'm not an expert on this but feel like a 250w light is not the major driver of cost in EUV? Or am I misunderstanding this?
They have uptime only about 80%. They need to be stopped, calibrated and maintained frequently.
They do not go obsolete quicly. They are constantly upgraded. 10-15 year old fabs and machines are still running all over the world. There are 1000 nm, 90nm, 40 nm, 14 nm fabs still running. High-end is not all of semiconductor industry.
https://zeptobars.com/en/read/AD9361-SDR-Analog-Devices-DAC-...
Relevant quotes (and the current retail price if anything is higher now then when the article was written):
“ Retail price of AD9361 at distributes is 275$, volume price from manufacturer is 175$.
That is quite an impressive added value! For 1,68$ of manufacturing cost we are getting 173,32$ of added value! Even Intel with their x86 or drug cartels could NOT do business like that.”
Of course, the actual margin needs to take into account NRE and other costs (and the above link does get into that) but, in this case, the manufacturing is a tiny sliver of the costs.
I assume the real saving is on the cost of the machine in the first place, and again relying on my AI buddy Claude:
Let me break down the costs of both Nanoimprint Lithography (NIL) and Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines:
NIL Machine Cost:
Basic NIL systems: $1-3 million Advanced NIL systems (like those from Canon/Molecular Imprints): $10-15 million
EUV Machine Cost:
Current ASML EUV systems (like the NXE:3400C): Approximately $150-200 million per unit Latest generation ASML EUV systems (NXE:3600D): Over $300 million per unit Installation and support infrastructure can add $30-50 million
**
So, looks like $200M+ saving going with NIL vs EUV.
You already lose most of the input power in the pulsed laser. Then only a fraction of the energy of the light hitting the tin is converted to EUV light with the correct wavelength. Finally the EUV light has to be focused on the mask through complicated optics, which is notoriously difficult for EUV light.
I guess, there are other sources of inefficiencies, that I forgot.
“We pulse lasers in sync with dispensing droplets of molten tin to produce light that doesn’t exist outside of stars, then we use mirrors with a sub-angstrom surface roughness to precisely direct it onto wafers.”
Not to mention the fact that this is happening, IIRC, thousands of times per second, and the tool has to take the wafer’s topography into account to focus the beam. Honestly, EUV litho makes every other technology you could describe sound like child’s play.
30 years ago I think you could have gotten any number of experts to explain why both EUV lithography and modern disk drives are impossible.
It's clearly some people that are very smart that can only be explained by aliens
From what I understand, tin-based sources are easier to work with because they are point-like. All the energy is produced from a tiny droplet. Synchrotron sources produce much wider beams, that need to be re-focused properly.
Same reason it's called "euv" and not "soft x-ray".