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A new startup claims it can make chips at sub-nanometer scales in a single exposure at roughly half the cost. Instead of high-NA EUV lithography, they’re using X-ray lithography. EUV prints features through multiple complex steps. This approach would effectively stamp the pattern in one shot. If it works...

172,629 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten •via X (Twitter)

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ACCELERATOR-BASED LITHOGRAPHY AND THE INDUCTION STORAGE RING LIGHT SOURCE The future of chipmaking may look less like a factory and more like a power grid. The proposed “Terafab” paradigm reimagines semiconductor manufacturing at utility scale: chip design, wafer fabrication, EUV lithography, memory, advanced packaging, and testing all under one roof, with the ambition of producing more than one terawatt of AI compute capacity per year. Its most radical innovation is treating light as a utility. Today, each EUV scanner relies on its own laser-produced plasma source, firing lasers at molten tin to generate 13.5 nm light. The process is inefficient, intensely hot, debris-heavy, and difficult to scale. Terafab replaces those individual sources with centralized, accelerator-driven free-electron lasers capable of distributing multi-kilowatt EUV light across an entire network of scanners. The advantages could be transformative: • No tin contamination or destructive plasma debris • Higher efficiency through electron-beam energy recovery • Greater photon flux to suppress stochastic defects at sub-3 nm nodes • Redundant accelerators that keep scanners operating during maintenance • Tunable wavelengths, potentially enabling 6.x nm “Beyond EUV” lithography THAT LAST POINT MATTERS ENORMOUSLY Conventional EUV is locked to the atomic emission of tin. Free-electron lasers are not. Their wavelength can be tuned through the energy of the electron beam creating a possible path beyond today’s 13.5 nm limit. If realized, Terafab would represent more than a larger semiconductor plant. It would transform lithography from a collection of isolated tools into shared industrial infrastructure. The next era of chipmaking may not be defined by a better machine. It may be defined by an entirely new architecture for manufacturing intelligence at civilization scale.

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SITUATION EXPLAINED: A Chinese state-backed company started mass-producing DUV lithography tools, a step below EUV but still significant. • ASML shares fell as much as 6.5%, their lowest since early June, after The Information reported a Shanghai-based, state-backed company began mass-producing immersion DUV lithography machines • The company is Shanghai Yuliangsheng, with ties to Huawei and the SiCarrier equipment group, it brought together immersion DUV development teams from other Chinese firms • Plans call for 5 tools this year and 20 next year, with confirmed customers SMIC, CXMT, and Hua Hong Semiconductor • Real caveat: SMIC has actually been trialing this tool since September 2025, and active mass production isn't targeted until 2027 at the earliest • Independent analysis from the AI Futures Project puts commercial-scale Chinese immersion DUV in the mid-2030s, with ASML still holding 98.7% of the immersion lithography market • Chinese chipmakers are currently only allowed to buy ASML's older DUV tools, not its cutting-edge EUV machines • The MATCH Act, moving through Congress, would widen restrictions specifically on immersion DUV equipment • China is separately developing its own domestic EUV machine, but that project remains at the prototype stage and is likely years away from producing working chips • Nikon and Canon are the only other established DUV/lithography vendors outside ASML, alongside SMEE as another Chinese domestic challenger Theo Jaffee: "Someone has to own the bottom of the market. Chinese DUV would be the same thing for ASML. The frontier leading-edge chip fabs will still be using ASML EUV machines, but less leading-edge fabs would use DUV machines, like, for example, it would be really helpful for Huawei."

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