This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The EU should secure a deal with Taiwan. The US has already tried to extort money of Taiwan by threatening the removal of protection. For the sake of democracy's power and prosperity, the EU should offer to officially protect Taiwan. Having access to quality chips is key to all sorts of things.
Anyhow, the channel 'Asianometry', has a video covering the physics of EUV machines. They are an incredible linchpin of our modern world.
In the meanwhile, EU also have to focus on manufacturing of the chips themselves in the long run, instead of depending on a 20 million nation.
Mainland Europe has never had a culture of computer hardware development or manufacture. They've been coasting on the United States and Britain since WWII. Name me a CPU architecture developed in the EU. There's one, ARM. British.
Furthermore, Europe just doesn't have the work ethic to run a chip fab. You know those attempts to bring fabs to the United States? They're running afoul of American labor laws, turns out American citizens won't work 14 hour days like the Taiwanese. You lazy ass Europeans with your 51 weeks of vacation a year don't have a snowball's chance in hell of making your own CPUs.
Meanwhile ASML just stops doing R&D and give up on its extremely specialized supply chain. /s
Haven't China also claimed a lot of impossible tasks like Cold Fusion, cure for cancer, and breaking most modern encryptions?
Might want to remain skeptical for now.
Cut off a nation as big and determined as China and they will just become more self sufficient.
Nations can't be determined.
Anyway. Yes, but there's nuance, China is not heaven on earth.
when discussing when China could catch up to the US in the semiconductor race.
BS. Untied states are not competitive at all for a long time. They should say China is catching up with Taiwan.
And it's not a race, there's no finish line, improvements have been happening for 50 years now and can continue for decades.
These machines are made only here. They are owned by a company in the Netherlands, though.
That's just the imperialists telling on themselves. They don't consider what is Taiwan's as Taiwan's, but as being made exclusively for the US' benefit.
Who are the imperialists?
US.
Yep. The rest of us switched to metric a long time ago.
If you were wondering what the hell EUV (Extreme Ultra-Violet) stood for:
https://waferscope.com/duv-vs-euv-whats-the-real-difference-in-chipmaking/
This table from the link sums it up pretty well:
Using shorter and shorter wavelengths of light to etch chips with a higher density of transistors.
I wonder what the next generation will be called...EUV-2TM (EUV-2 THE MAX) or SEUV (Super EUV) perhaps?
I assume they will move from UV to X-rays.
We're getting close! EUV is currently ~13nm, and soft xrays start at ~10nm (but go all the way down to ~0.01nm for hard xrays.)
Sadly there a lots of challenges in transitioning to smaller wavelengths. For example, to get the EUV light in the existing process, we're already resorting to, essentially, exploding tiny droplets of liquid tin using lasers.
What happens to Taiwan when China is competitive on chips?
I could see them deciding to invade, Taiwan destroys their fabs, and then China gets a monopoly but also sanctions.
The west ultimately ends up unable to build chips and China has a global monopoly.
Have Intel and Samsung stopped making chips recently?
Taiwan being invaded would make the current component shortages look like nothing in comparison. TSMC fabricates the vast majority of high-end chips used by basically every computer and smartphone. They have a two-thirds market share while the next biggest player, Samsung, has around 10%, and Intel barely registers. If you want high-yield nanometer-scale precision manufacturing, TSMC is practically your only real choice.
My comment was more about the Chinese monopoly that would ensue if TSMC were taken out.
Okay but Japan had a major breakthrough the other day that made this technique obsolete for the majority of components.
I mean if every headline about massive breakthroughs was the full truth all our appliances would be powered by tiny nuclear power plants and we would fly around with our jetpack. Cancer would be but a distant memory and world hunger a non issue because vertical farms would be literally in every home.
so, no jetpacks?
Average East-Asian news cycle:
China: “We are preventing the export of rare earth minerals to strengthen our country.”
US: “We are imposing tariffs to strengthen our economy.”
Japan: “22-year-old undergraduate turns a leaf into a battery.”
German-Japanese scientist:
What was the Japanese breakthrough? Got a link?
Found it! Nano Imprint Lithography (NIL).
Can someone smarter than me or at least more informed explain how this compares
Thanks. Oh yes, I heard about this technology (but not the latest update) from a youtube video. It’s completely insane!
Insanely good or Insanely stupid?
It has its pros and cons. Pros are that it's faster and uses less energy and no complex optics system. Cons are that they have to replace the masks fairly regularly because they degrade with each imprint made. This probably also means that yields are lower towards the end of the life of the mask.
This seems about right. Progress was originally supposed to be 5-10 years. I'm not too sure on how effective these prototypes are. My guess is that their progress of EUV sources is quite far now, but that they'll still need to have greater progress in regards to domestically created collector & debris mitigation systems, projection optics, mask blanks and other things.
Edit Addendum: Note, article agrees with the timeline of 5 years behind for China. Since their EUV source(presumably) works differently from ASML's LPP EUV(many think China is going LDP route for EUV source), research may still go up to 10 years, as they will likely need to account for this when researching the other components in a full scanner. Alot of significant modifications or straight up new shit will have to be made. And even then, it'll need to be commerically viable to compete with the West.
And even then, it'll need to be commerically viable to compete with the West.
Well, unless they invaded Taiwan...
Did anyone think they would not?
Given enough time it's inevitable any determined organization could make it.
Given enough time and an enormous budget it’s inevitable any determined organization could make it.
This kind of milestone isn't reachable by most countries in the world mostly because of the price tag attached to it
