Asianometry
11 HN recommenders · recommended in 13 months, 2022–2025
17:20 · 698K views · Dec 26, 2021
Asianometry explains the EUV light source inside ASML's lithography machines, where lasers hit falling tin droplets twice to produce 13.5 nm light. It walks through the engineering of the droplet generator, the pre-pulse and main laser, and the plasma that results.
Commenters repeatedly point to it whenever EUV, ASML or chip manufacturing comes up, as a clear and astonishing explanation of one of the hardest engineering problems in chipmaking.
20 comments from Hacker News
EUV lithography is interesting. You drop a microscopic droplet of tin. You then aim and shoot it not once, but twice with a laser so it produces the correct wavelength. Then you do this with 100% reliability thousands of times per second all day, every day for years. The problem doing this with fusion seems to be money. Their "big" grant of 600M wouldn't even buy a handful of those machines and wouldn't come close to the many billions it has cost in the past 30+ years of research to reach the point where they are finally viable (it had been "a few months away" ever since the early 2000s). This video from Asianometry on EUV light sources is well worth the watch. It's pretty incredible. this video
Because the EUV machines that ASML build are the most complex machines ever built by humans and getting all the bits to work properly takes decades of R+D e.g. watch this about the light source, its completely bonkers this video
Anyone interested in the details should watch this video: this video (has the same graphics) without any hyperbole the 2-shot laser thing necessary to emit EUV is just mind bending.
Two must watch videos about the whole process: this video [LINK] (Typed on a device made by this process, which I still don’t quite believe.)
There's a lot of expertise with lithography around the world too (companies like Canon build lithography machines), but we're not talking the usual levels of it. The EUV lasers ASML/TRUMPF builds don't even work the same way other "conventional" lasers would[1]. You physically can't get there by incrementally improving some existing process. Now I don't know how ZEISS makes mirrors that blown up to the size of a country would have imperfections smaller than a human hair, but I'm pretty sure it's no small feat either. These companies invested decades and untold sums into this when few other companies even had incentive to attempt it themselves. Sure, other companies could eventually replace them, but you're not closing a 2-decade technology gap in an afternoon. [1] It's a bit insane, really. Vaporizing falling droplets of tin with two laser pulses 100,000 times a second to get just the right wavelength? Here's a good video: this video