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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

The whole “exploding tiny drops of metal” in the middle of this is just Loony Toons. This machine is literally insane and two of the companies I am long-long on would be completely fucked without it.

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You forgot WITH LASERS, and IN A VACUUM

IIRC from the Veritasium video[0] there is actually some hydrogen gas flowing at quite a high speed though the laser chamber to carry away the tin debris so that it does not accumulate on the mirrors.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0

They account to every single tiny atom somehow too, but I think I fell asleep last time I watched the video.

The old SemiAccurate article https://semiaccurate.com/2013/02/13/euv-moves-forward-two-st... was very funny.

Seeing this news story made me briefly fear that they’d found a way to replace this glorious mechanism. Thankfully not. In fact, they’re going to shoot more droplets, more often!

So much more fun than LEDs.

Yes it was crazy when I first heard about it "wait what? they shoot it in mid-air?" and that was before I found out they did that like 30k times a second.

But now 100k times a second apparently. Humans are amazing.

You have a machine that’s basically a clean room inside and one of the parts is essentially electrosputtering tin but then throwing all the tin away and using the EM pulse from the sputter to do work.

Oh and can you build it so it can run hundreds or thousands of hours before being cleaned? Thanks byyyyyyyyeeeeee!

The inside of those machines are far, far cleaner than the inside of any clean room ever entered by a human. They have to be molecularly clean.

Which isn't easy considering they explode tin droplets in the machine. I think that's the point the other commenter wanted to make.

Think about the purity requirements that places on the tin.

> We are going to spray expensive stuff in an extremely fine and precise line. Then we're going to shoot a laser at each droplet.

< Why?!

> To make a better laser.

< Yes, of course you are.

> 100,000 times per second.

< [AFK, buying shares.]

I have shares in one of their biggest customers, and one of their customer’s biggest customers.

We are quickly leaving the realm of dependent variables still looking anything like diversification.

> We are quickly leaving the realm of dependent variables still looking anything like diversification.

What does that mean?

It seems like you want someone to ask you what the two companies are. So - what are the two companies?

Nvidia and an AI company

Don't forget that they are hitting each droplet 3 times.

That is why each machine costs a few hundred million eurodollars.

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