TSMC, Intel, Samsung, Hynix, ASML & other suppliers of the integrated chipset manufacturing groups of which there are more than 400 ArF machines in use & about 50 EUV machines. Power requirements make deep EUV & beyond dramatically more expensive + the optics all based on reflecting 193 nm light because optical lens materials absorb it. Purified hydrogen gas has to be pumped over the mirror surfaces to keep the tin plasma vapors & high energy electrons from ablating or chemical damaging the primary light source mirror. This is deep dive into how the industry going beyond 3nm.
Mobile Chipset Energy Targets
Today most smartphones have a small SOC that can be image printed with lithography in one shot meaning no complex stitching required for 5nm chipset SOC's in the latest generation of smartphones. Bleeding edge chip lithography used for smartphones because of very aggressive performance per watt or power efficiency targets have to be achieved if the phone will provide users with good battery life performance from a 4ah lipo for about a day of "average use"
Your Smartphone Life May Vary
I say average because ride hailing company drivers like UBER or LIFT drivers often have their smartphone plugged into the 12v power outlet via a 5v 2amp USB C or Lighting power adapter & cable or QI charger dock with 15 watts of wireless inductive charging // this constant on hot operation & fully charging the battery ends up cooking or heat damaging these users phones such that phones used this way have shorter useful life, like ruined after 8 months of daily heavy duty mobile use that bricks the phone. Backup your files on your phone regularly to a cloud service or other less used computer or hard drive or backup drive regularly if you have content you care not to lose if your phone is broken, damaged, run-over or bricked or catches fire or bend badly snapping the logic board or some other major impact damage that destroys the phone-
Energy Efficient Compute Goals
Power efficiency the target of cloud computers, i.e. server blades in racks in data centers where MW or GW levels of electrical energy converted to logic switching, network traffic IO & waste heat & lots of it. Anything that they can do to improve the electrical efficiency of internet compute will lower operating costs or improve profitability of companies like Apple or Alphabet Inc or Netflix or Amazon, or any other business that is network IT centric with users accessing services they provide for a fee or to access sales on Ebay or Alibaba-- think Comcast & Time Warner & Century Link or Facebook or Twitter for examples
Smartphone Chips to Laptops
Ultrabook standards created by Intel some time ago even put thin & light laptops on the road to fan-less thin form factors now utilizing smartphone like processors like Apples M1 chipset in mobile products. Tablets are better for content consumption while laptops & desktops with mechanical keyboards are better for publishing & productivity. I write this blog on an iMac desktop computer that pairs with my latest iPhone SE & Apple Watch SE etc // an ecosystem that Meg & I invested into years ago & are now intrenched / sadly / especially given the way Apple does not make hardware as durable as they once did or rather their designs from California as executed in production by Foxconn or Hon Hai Precision seem to be less reliable or less strong, made of glass front & back now // easier to break / damaged by 100% regular overnight charging that most people do, when 30-80% charging for shorter periods would make the lipo battery last 5x longer. The smartphone makers & designers design overcharging as no sane engineer would charge a lipo beyond 4.11vdc when most of the phones overcharge to 4.26 or 4.35 vcd respectively - such over-charging of lithium polymer batteries often results in venting with flame like the Galaxy Note 7 battery explosion debacle that cost Samsung more than 18 billion in losses during the recall thereof.
Chipset Lithography Amazing
Lithography means using light to edge features into substrates like mono-crystalline silicon wafers cut from enormous heavy very hot furnace slow twist extraction boule's that demonstrate silicons amazing strength properties, a 600+ lbs or 250 kg silicon crystal boule can hand from a 1mm diameter silicon thread connected (see image)
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| Link to Source |
Process known as the Czochralski method where a seed crystal lowered into an ultra pure molten bath of silicon, then slowly extracts as the silicon atoms attach to the seed crystal it builds up layers of silicon that produce a conical shape until the final diameter reached, an adjustable diameter lid on the furnace allows the hot slow extraction to happen while mining the gap between the lid & the constantly expanding diameter of the emerging silicon boule.
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| Schematic of RF Heating Single Crystal Boule Production |
Wafer Supply Bottleneck
These boule's are then sliced into wafers with a diamond coated 10 miles long band saw blade wire, where the tungsten alloy wire covered in tiny ceramic adhesive attached synthetic diamonds or natural diamond dust particles that abrasively cut the cylindrical boule into thousands of wafer blanks for further 100 + stage electro-chemical processing steps applied during the manufacture of integrated circuits, images sensors or computer memory & other chipsets. The graphics card shortage largely due to a lack of chipset manufacturing capacity, a system which was affected by COVID19 epidemic supply chain interruptions & increased demand for gaming graphics cars & new personal computers for people to work from home with video conferencing or remote meetings etc //
Wafer Pre-Processing requires polishing the surface of the silicon wafers to ultra high optical lens precision levels for incredible surface flatness with ultra-tight tolerances or super ultra low levels of surface defects. The material surface on which the integrated surface constructed has to have absolutely precise tolerances because any defect on the base will translate into problems in later processing stages that produce additional defective chips in the output testing stage, reducing yield or making the production more costly or less profitable. Consider the smaller EUV 5nm chips in the latest smartphone with a very low net SOC chip area on the wafer, so many thousands can be cut from a 300mm wafer, brings the costs of the smartphones CPU, GPU, Memory core down to just $15-45 USD 2021 amazingly!
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| Boule Cutting into Wafers |
Solar PV Wafer Demand too
The global chipset shortage limited by this process stream, from silicon mining to boule making & boule cutting also used to make mono-crystalline solar photovoltaic panels with P & N dopes layers so the electrons want to join the holes & move through an electrical circuit along the way to perform work *physics of how solar PV works also super cool. The ion bombard the wafers with phosphorus atoms & nitrogen atoms to create positive & negative layers joined. As photons from the sun or sufficiently bright artificial light sources strikes the top surface of a solar PV module, electrons are kicked off the loose electron material & collected in silver wires & directed as current or direct current through a circuit (work, wattage, energy consumed) on their way back to the hole layer where electrons want to fill the empty orbital shells of the "holes" lower layer. Some of the best PV panels made with multiple band-gap layers so different energies of photons can be captured, the lowest energy on top & higher energy photons deeper down, that way the multi-junction panel can achieve higher energy conversion efficiency from sunlight to direct or DC current // power output by converting more of the SUN's incident rays striking the PV panels into electricity -- a truly magical process with no moving parts & ultra long life in well made PV panels that can last 50 years or more in real world outdoor sky facing applications.
Energy Consumption
Typical argon fluoride emersion lithography systems use about 47 kw while a deep UV system with similar capacity consumes 532 kw // this makes chips made with EUV much more expensive per unit of chipset area on the wafer. Also, because of the limited focusing & contrast limitations of EUV, making large chipsets for server chips or defense applications or cutting edge AI at NVIDIA, means super ultra complex stitching processes required with anamorphic mirror projection that ASML working on at a feverish pitch... Beyond EUV will enable several more generations of chipsets, starting with 7nm Intel processing nodes to current state of the art applied 5nm production then down to 3nm, 2nm & 1nm in marketing & advertising terms, probably into the later 2020's or even early 2030 given all the technical difficulties & energy consumption of EUV & damage to its main mirror even when ultra pure hydrogen gas flowing over the mirror surface utilized to enhance the mirrors life to 3000 hrs per year. Without hydrogen shielding the deep UV destroys the main EUV light-source mirror in less than 50 hrs.
Global Capacity
With chip production factories around the world, big players like Phillips, Canon, Ushio, Nikon, LG, Samsung, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Valve, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, & many hundreds of other companies in the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Korea & the United States are part of the chipset supply chain for ASML as both customers & suppliers, often collaborating internationally with their technical & scientific core & legal teams to share IP & logistics & core process innovation proprietary industry specific knowledge & know how, especially related to improving quantum yield or effective successful chips produced per wafer or what ratio of the wafer makes useful chips, later cut from the wafer with additional exotic saws // the entire chip supply chain employs millions of people directly & tens of millions or even hundreds of millions worldwide if you wrap in software development & other industries like CGI for movie production etc in the analytics of how far reaching chipset manufacturings footprint extends into a wide gamut of other industries employing millions more highly paid employees of many different skill sets & education levels. Integrated circuits or computer chips are the most complicated product manufactured by mankind worldwide, really a marvel of applied science & engineering in pragmatic materials science & chemical engineering & electrical engineering interdisciplinary science fusion people communicating & sharing & edifying one another to enable ongoing innovation & emergent technologies to become commercialized for high volume production!
Wafer Processing Machines Complicated
Some of these ASML machines take 6 months to assemble onsite in a cleanroom, with amazing HVAC filtering technology to keep contaminates out of the optically precise machines, where any particle would introduce glitch or error defects into the wafers produced & resulting chipset failures or waste thats very expensive with lots of rare & valuable metals utilized in the production. Lots of toxic & hard to manage strong acids & corrosive chemicals & photopolymers & other nasty harsh chemicals that require the employee's at a chip fab to wear bunny suits, mostly to keep human body particles out of the machines but also to protect employees servicing the machines or working on the machines. A wafer can undergo more than 126 stages to build the 3D pipeline structure of a stacked logic integrated circuit. We are talking about billions of transistors & miles of wires in a chip smaller than a human fingernail!
ASML Training Highly Educated People
Even training the high educated employees on how to use the machines takes months of special education seminars & hands on demonstration by ASML employee trainers who teach the CHIP fab employees how to make use of all the special features & functions of their amazingly complicated machines, the most complex machines in the world.
Quality Analysis & Quality Control & or QAQC
Zeiss optics of Germany provides specialty optics & optical engineering services to the chipfab sector as well as producing some of the finest quality lenses & lens assemblies of any company on Earth! It all comes down to perfecting the mechanical pitch of features, line smooth edges & fewer corner or bridge defects along with the ability to find & patch errors quickly on each assembly layer of the 100+ layer process tree applied to wafers to make chipsets. Quality analysis means finding the error or glitches & quality control means applying creative engineering solutions to fix or limit defects in production. QAQC important for automakers like Toyota who builds the highest quality longest lasting passenger cars & SUV's in the world for their luxury brand Lexus in America :) Any defect, some the size of atoms, can introduce image artifacts or chromatic aberration into the lithography projector, especially any dust particles. We are talking about making transistors so small that the electrons moving through them introduce noise to the adjacent gate logic nearby via inductive interference. Ever hear of High K materials beyond silicon, thats why, they need something with more resistance or better conductivity like carbon-nano tubes to go beyond silicon in wafer chipset lithography.
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| Light Mirror Path of ASML Lithography Machine |
EUV & More
Started in the late 1980's, it uses CO2 lasers bombard liquid tin droplets to make deep UV light & this light source has to make a lot since the mirror optics only reflect 70% of that light. This means dumping hundreds of thousands of watts of energy into a CO2 laser that turns 10% of that energy into long wave IR photons at higher energy levels that ionize the tiny liquid tin droplets such that the outer orbital electrons of the tin atoms raise an energy level & upon relaxing to their lower energy orbit spit off a deep UV photon with high energy levels.
Photon Energy Conversion
This principle of band gap energy conversion of ionized atoms taking one kind of photon energy & emitting another, the core function of LED & lasers & OLED & many other artificial lighting technologies like Metal Halide my favorite or Sodium Vapor my all time favorite due to its long life of 200,000 hrs & nearly monochromatic non-human stimulating low CRI light output (orange street lamps, observatory lights & other high pressure low CRI sodium lamps, bulbs or lights) // I dislike the vivid daylight 5000k or 6000k LED lights applied in public outdoor lighting fixtures or lamps that shine that light towards the sky creating light pollution & glare in the eyes of people who gaze or look upon or at or near these lamps at night, causing sleep disorders like insomnia since the bright blue light hitting the human eye stimulates the SCN neurons in the retina linked to the hormonal control axis of cortisol & melatonin so as to increase cortisol release which causes wakefulness promotion while suppressing the production of melatonin, the sleep promoting hormone in the human circadian rhythm system. Energy conversion a big topic in the future, from EV conversion of DC energy in the battery to AC energy in the VFD controlled AC final drive or traction motors of high efficiency across a broad range of RPM.
I am Obsessed with Light Physics
I have more than 8 years of professional experience in the lighting sector & know a lot about lamps & bulbs that most people will encounter & main other kinds that few people will encounter. Short Arc Xenon like the IMAX projector lamp another one of my favorites & similar to surgical lighting & other aerospace & automotive HID lighting thats brighter than most commercially available LED's or LED modules, with much better luminous flux density or lumen edited per volumetric area in the bulb. The hot plasma in HID super amazing & held in a high pressure fuzed quart envelop with thoriated tungsten electrodes :)
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| DIY CO2 laser like the one I made as a child! Special thanks to Mr. Westcot for helping me! |
CO2 Lasers are Dope! Built a weaker ~10 watt version DIY as middle school student!
I also love CO2 lasers & built one as a hobby when I was 12 years old- I wish I still had it or pictures of it. It took me over a year to build using money to buy the parts & vacuum pump & vacuum pump oil & vacuum hoses & CO2 tank & regulator & mirror & the optical borosilicate neon lamp tube & gaskets & seals & the power supply was a turd to make from DIY parts assemble from microwave ovens & flash lamps & other tech, I had help from a retired elderly electrical engineer who lived next-door to my uncle Fred, Mr. Lowenthal, may God bless his soul, he designed IR seeker heads for missiles for the Israeli government via Pentagon contracts with unnamed US companies :) He showed me his patents, engraved in bronze on wood mountings :) Super inspiring, he was a mentor who came to my middle school & decided to help me become more like him!
Science Accidents at Home
I had to destroy my laser via disassembly & sell all the parts because I accidentally set fire to my parents house by accidentally directing the output beam at a wood door while I was adjusting the power supply & only started smelling smoke after the door was on fire, the door set the wood deck above it on fire. I was quick to grab the garden hose & turn on the water & spray the burning wood to put out the fire, but it caused thousands of dollars of damage that I had to fix & repair with the help of a contractor. It was a rental house that John had rented my parents to help us & I felt bad for damaging it. This after I accidentally blew out the garage doors of the house I first grew up in as a 5 year old boy who just watched Mister Wizard demonstrate a dust explosion. I went to the garage knowing there was saw dust in the carpet in front of the work bench. I climbed up & grabbed my dads push start propane blow torch, then climbed down with it, shook the carpet vigorously to suspend the dust in the air of the closed garage without cars in it, then turn on the propane valve of the torch & click the piezo-igniter & boom, the expanding dust explosion knocked me over & badly damaged the garage doors :) lol
Ultra Pure Water Supply Constraint
Fresh water resources are a critical supply component for chipset manufacturing & influence where chip fabs can be built & how they are operated, especially to limit pollution emission & to maintain ultra pure water production & recycling & special water handling in chipset fabrication stages & water recovery & post processing for pollutant capture & re-purification for direct reuse in closed loop stages that do not waste water or minimize fresh water consumption. Much of the chemistry used in wafer processing stages such that water used to rinse or remove masks or to purge the wafer layer of excess chemical or to hydro-or electro-hydro etch or oxidize a layer etc. Water can be acidic or basic & exploitation of this property makes it very useful with the metals they apply to the chips, the photopolymers they apply to chips & other processing stages in chipset fabs around the world!
Sources
Amazing Semi-engineering Article
https://semiengineering.com/extending-euv-to-2nm-and-beyond/
Exceptional YouTube Content about EUV
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