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.
It's clearly some people that are very smart that can only be explained by aliens
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.
Same reason it's called "euv" and not "soft x-ray".
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.