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Comment by cowthulhu | Hacker News Reader

This doesn’t seem plausible. Leading edge lithography requires you to be at (or beyond) the cutting edge in many realms - even with a breakthrough in one realm, I don’t understand how a startup could expect to catch up to ASML across the board in a few years.

Their website is light on technical details and heavy on nationalistic fluff, which does not lend much confidence.

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It is actually relatively easy to make a lithography machine that can etch features beyond what EUV can do. You simply use an electron scanning beam rather than photons.

It's what the industry uses to create the masks used in lithography machines, but it could just as easily be used to make the actual chip. The problem is that it doesn't scale, at all. A scanning process is way too slow to be useful in mass production.

Thus you should always be skeptical when someone says they've built a machine that beats ASML's machines, because that's actually the easy part. The hard part is scaling it up.

Interesting! Makes me think of old 1990s X-Files episodes with chips under a microscope “smaller than we can produce”.

I wonder if the government makes small batches of bespoke chips that are super miniature based on non scalable processes, and how far back in time would they have been able to develop 1nm chips for example?

The TV series could have been true! Even in the 1980s we could push individual atoms around, albeit very very slowly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope#...)

The node sizes have become more of marketing term, so it's more useful to look at the half-pitch resolution when doing comparisons. In 2007 researchers demonstrated they could reach a 15nm half-pitch using an electron scanning beam. [1] Whereas ASML reliably achieved this resolution using EUV around 2017.

Thus in the early 2000s you would be about 10 years ahead using electron scanning beam lithography. However that assumes you have all the tooling and transistor designs to actually create a working chip at that resolution. Showing you can etch a feature at nanometer scale is one thing, actually using it to create a working chip is a whole other ball game.

[1] https://spie.org/news/0599-double-exposure-makes-dense-high-...

Patterning is just one of many issues.

Lmao no it's not "relatively easy"

Funnily enough Asianometry just did a video on tsmcs new masks and how the machines involved WERE particularly hard to develop, "Multi-Beam Mask Writer" that uses hundreds of thousands of electron beams (after splitting) to accomplish its task.

Nothing about that industry is easy.

Emphasis on the "relative", I meant relative to actually developing a successor to EUV that can be used in mass production.

At best they will manufacture masks. But that was already the "easy" part right?

> investments from the Central Intelligence Agency-backed nonprofit firm In-Q-Tel

The CIA has stolen trade secrets in the past and the only thing that stopped them in recent history is their own policies. The CIA has a new director that has been violating international law more openly than ever.

Their website is that way because the goal is to attract the attention of the administration.

Exactly. And it should. The "CHIPS Act" should be thought of as a perpetual blank cheque to whoever can build the components necessary to build war machines completely with North American components (primarily USA components but Canada will have some impact)

But its a scam.

I don't know much about the technical details of lithography, but I do know that EUV lithography is very new tech that has been in production for less than 10 years and the current machines are basically rube goldberg devices. Given my lack of technical knowledge here, I can't say whether or nor this startup in particular is legit, but it does seem very much like the type of thing that could be disrupted by someone who comes up with a new and massively simplified design.

EUV machines were in development for nearly 20 years before they could reach actual chip production. The secret sauce was not getting it to work, but getting it to work stable enough such that it can be sustained millions of times per second. I am sure there were other huge challenges in bringing to market though, I am not an expert on this either.

Yeah, that's kind of my point. The design is so complicated that the hard part is actually getting it to work reliably in production. So it could just be that the current way is the only fundamental design that works and there is no radically simpler way to make EUV lithography work, but 99% of the time there is.

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