It's definitely an "on the shoulders of giants standing on the shoulders of giants" thing. Insane breakthrough technologies on top of other insane breakthroughs. Firing lasers at microscopic molten drops of metal in a controlled enough manner to get massively consistent results like what??

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itopaloglu83 11 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s a mind blowing achievement, nothing below sorcery if you think about it.

ASML machines are hitting tin droplets with 25kW laser 50,000 times a second to turn them into plasma to create the necessary extreme ultraviolet light, and despite generating 500W of EUV, only a small fraction can reach the wafer, due to loses along the way. I believe it was like 10%.

Here’s an incredible, very detailed video about it: https://youtu.be/B2482h_TNwg

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martinpw 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That is a very high quality video.

One thing I am curious about - how many generations of process shrink is one of these machines good for? They talk about regular EUV and then High-NA EUV for finer processes, but presumably each machine works for multiple generations of process shrink? If so, what needs to be adjusted to move to a finer generation of lithography and how is it done? Does ASML come in and upgrade the machine for the next process generation, or does it come out of the box already able to deliver to a resolution a few steps beyond the current state of the art?

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MBCook 7 hours ago | parent [-]

If you’re interested in this stuff Asianometry has lots of great videos. They’re not all on semiconductors, but he’s done a lot on this history, developments, and what’s going on in that world.

https://www.youtube.com/c/Asianometry/videos

	▲	justinator an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I've learned so much from this channel. One of the best out there. Even the video about zippers was fascinating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d6eNmtHFQk

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bigwheels 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That is a really cool video, thank you!

Maybe the high water usage is at some other stage? Or intermediate preceding stages? I'd love to understand more end-to-end, as surely it isn't as easy as popping a wafer in a semi-truck trailer sized lithography machine.

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jjmarr 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I've been trying to find that video!! Our professor showed it in class but I was half-asleep and I wanted to rewatch it so badly.