Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator
economist.com
economist.com
I remember reading the tinfoil hat theory about three-letter agencies making low-quantity high-cost chips at incredible process sizes in order to break encryption. I doubt that's still as viable today as it was before leakage currents started dominating, but it was an impressively plausible theory.
Also, some of today's work in quantum computers uses superconducting qubits. Maybe that's in the same research stage now. No idea if it will ever become practical.
I can bet there are superconductor/photonics/topologically different/strange memory/smaller process size prototypes around.
Right now we are getting to the limits of transistor sizes, but even a couple of years ago experimental prototypes of smaller process size were developed years before mass production.
Aside from LCS35, most cryptographic problems are about as easy with two processors that are half as fast as one processor that costs twice as much.
proof? i'm just like... where? where do you think people are making these chips and using which ovens?
> smaller process size prototypes around
no there aren't. there just aren't. you could hide this in your basement about as easily as you could hide building your own space shuttle (and launching).
You do realize we all know it's impossible to have any degree of certainty in asserting the non-existence of something, right?
“For every instance, e equals mc²”
“There is no instance where e does not equal mc².”
People should really read more hume if they're going to weigh in on philosophy of science.
I love condescension that is so petty it's laughable. As the commenters said below there are very well-understood precedents/principles that allow me to conclude "no" here eg
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
So no it's not "impossible to have any degree of certainty in asserting the non-existence of something", we actually have a whole branch of mathematics dedicated to exactly that (it's called probability and statistics).
This is precisely why I don't trust people who aver without receipts to show. Open the schools, goddammit!
Until I see some reasonable evidence that smaller process size cannot exist, i just see lazy people getting angry that someone disagrees with them. All of this "burden of proof" bullshit, aping like you're in some kind of formal debate rather than a conversation with a stranger, just screams "emotional asshole who can't deal with someone disagreeing with them and never learned how to engage in basic conflict resolution when they had the ability to engage in good faith and chose not to".
Y'all deserve all the mockery society can afford. I'm at least honest in that I see conflict is what we need more than ever if only to put people like you in your place.
There's no hiding anything here. You can find random articles about publicity stunts companies used to try based on these. Specifically when IBM was in the game, and Intel until they got butchered by incompetence.
IIRC EUV development picked plasma over synchrotron because plasma projected to be cheaper, even though technically synchrotron had more benefits. Queue many, many years of solving for technical challenges for LPP and now commercialized EUV machines cost 200m, 400m for next high NA. Which is about the cost of multiple small or single medium size synchrotron facility. It's amazing plasma EUV works, but it's also a failure in the sense that it is FAR less economical than originally envisioned, which explains why particle accelerator route is still being worked on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-beam_lithography
Edit: Confused SEMs and STMs, but the principle described above applies to both.
My startup is trying to do this, and it is a fiendishly hard problem.
And you can’t use existing tools. You need an atomically precise scanning probe tip with very specific reactive chemical structure, but NOT react with the surface while scanning with a voltage bias.
And where do you source feedstock from? Needs to be delivered to the surface in passive form but be activated when needed to switch to being chemically reactive in a specific way to get it on the transfer tool and then onto the part being built.
Oh, and this is without even getting into how many electronic structures are entirely invisible at certain voltages, everything looks like an identical blobish shape, surfaces are reconfiguring themselves constantly, and probes randomly crash due to piezo creep, destroying days or weeks of work.
My startup has solutions to all of these problems. And the payoff at the end is reliable, scalable quantum computers, followed by full-on Drexlarian nanotech. But yeah, it’s a fiendishly hard problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bw6Zi17DBI
The story of technological progress is one of shrinking feature sizes in manufacturing. Not just semiconductors, but everything. The Industrial Revolution is really the story of higher tolerance and more reliable manufacturing pins.
You can explore the physical limits of technology by looking at what happens when we reach perfect atomic precision--every atom where we want, in any configuration permitted by physical law. Across nearly every vertical, this represents a 100x to 1000x improvement. In some cases factors of 10^8 to 10^12 over present-day capabilities.
Developing a process to build structures atom-by-atom (essentially 3D printing diamond or other gemstone materials with atomic precision) would enable skipping to these theoretical limits, with the corresponding step function increase in functionality.
It would also move our technological base off being based on rare metals and alloys, and onto an industrial economy built on carbon (diamond and graphene), and other elements commonly available in the Earth's crust and atmosphere. After 3,000 years we will finally move from the Iron Age to the Diamond Age, and with it bring an eventual end to material scarcity and the economic basis for global conflict. You'd seriously need to go back as far as the invention of agriculture or Bronze Age or early Iron Age metallurgy to find a comparably transformative technological advancement.
Within the VC-fundable horizon of the next couple years, early versions of this manufacturing tech will permit making high-value quantum devices like sensors or qubits, as these can be manufactured by introducing certain defects into a growing crystal, with atomic precision relative to other defects or surface features.
The fall off from low orbit to surface is substantial in both event numbers and energy level.
The higher energy cosmic sourced events at surface level are down in the hundred or less a second (IIRC).
If there's a plan it'd likely include having 9x redundancy hardware surrounded by water deep in a former salt mine .. that'd take cosmic ray events way down and provide a (best of three) x (tell me three times) "just in case" statistical sharpening.
You're welcome.
I trust you can do the math scaling from events per 42 litre volume to the volume in question here.
The altitude and air density factor in, any LEO applications have an increased risk, etc.
> The cross section is so small that the chance of it being hit over the lifetime of the product is ignorable.
Always a possibility under consideration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72#Potential_tri...
At an irrelevant scale. The cross sectional area of these devices will be 18 - 20 orders of magnitude smaller.
> Always a possibility under consideration...
We're talking about the cross section of a macro-scale (visible with the naked eye) chip vs. a cluster of a few dozen atoms. Certainly you can understand the difference of scale? Cosmic ray induced bit flips are extremely infrequent events at the datacenter scale.
What's the frequency at which a single, specific transistor will be struck? Not that a bit flip occurs somewhere in a large datacenter, but the chance of just a specific transistor being hit. Now reduce that 100-fold. That's the base rate we're talking about.
In the long-term vision of scaled-up nanotechnology, there will of course have to be redundancy and mechanisms for disabling, removing, and recycling (or incinerating) mechanisms destroyed by cosmic rays.
But in the near-term, it is an ignorable risk.
Quantum dots are not mechanosynthesized, or even atomically precise in many/most instances.
Scanning an electron beam, repeatedly over an entire waffer would take forever. So instead we do it once, to make the mask, and that mask is then used over and over to expose the waffer.
This is a bit little injection molding: the mold is very expensive and made with a far better manufacturing process than the plastic pieces that it will eventually produce, but this is the price to pay for high volumes and low costs.
It also doesn't tell you as much about how your design actually runs on the process in question.
That said, apart from the economics (it is very slow), you are also constrained with respect to the size of what you can write, the writing fields is typically quite small, if you want to make a chip larger than that you need to stitch fields together and you have to deal with stitching errors (which becomes more and more difficult the smaller your structures are).
2-3 wafers per minute would be 120-18 wafers per hour - did you mean wafers per hour for both?
1.5B transistors in a current intel core chip
300 die per wafer
150 wafers an hour
That means each litho tool prints 6.75 x 10^13 “transistors” per hour. In more useful units, that’s 18.75B transistors per second.
Drawing them one line at a time is technically feasible but…I’ll bet you are talking single digit DIE per hour if that.
And that is for one layer of lithography. I’ve seen estimates from 5-20 layers of lithography using EUV tools at the 3-7nm nodes. So the time scale is even more warped.
Things would get a bit radioactive at those energies, though.
Very cool you visited ASML. Anything exciting/interesting you'd be willing to tell the class?
- They need 3 Boeing 737’s to ship an EUV machine. - We talked with one guy who’s responsibility it was to design one of the calibration points the machine uses to find it’s zero position. This left me amazed that they’re able to ship a machine halfway across the world, re-assemble it and calibrate it again to such accuracy. And! On top of that, make it reproducible over different machines!
Hadn't thought about calibration afterwards. Crazy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-electron_laser
or some similar kind of device that turns the momentum of electrons into light. I'm a little surprised that they didn't try something like a FEL first instead of that terribly problematic device that uses highly inefficient lasers to blow up tin droplets, itself a high-loss process that produces contamination and resulted in years of delay developing materials for
https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories/2022/the-euv-pellicle-i...
Interestingly China has been continuing working on the synchotron based EUV litho idea (in addition to work to create domestically built tin laser EUV lithos machines).
https://www.asianometry.com/p/euv-lithography-but-with-a-fre...