Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog 4/8/2021
People reading yesterday’s piece on China’s semiconductor industry have been asking “Wait, are you saying every semiconductor maker in the world relies on one Dutch firm?â€
For new, cutting edge fabs, the short answer is yes. If you’ve bought a new computer or smart phone in the last year, the chances that at least some of the layers in some of the chips went through an ASML EUV stepper approaches 100%.
The technology required to produce EUV sounds like something a crazy person would dream up:
Earlier generations of kit employ lasers to produce light directly. But as wavelengths shrink, things get trickier. Inside a cutting-edge EUV machine 50,000 droplets of molten tin fall through a chamber at its base each second. A pair of lasers zap every drop, creating a plasma that in turn releases light of the desired wavelength. The mirrors guiding this light, made of sandwiched layers of silicon and molybdenum, are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimetre. Because EUV light is absorbed by almost anything, including air, the process must take place in a vacuum. To get into the production facilities, your correspondent had to don a special suit and leave his notebook behind, lest it shed unwanted fibres.
The machines, weighing 180 tonnes and the size of a double-decker bus, are themselves a testament to the electronics industry’s tangled supply chains. ASML has around 5,000 suppliers. Carl Zeiss, a German optics firm, fashions its lenses. VDL, a Dutch company, makes the robotic arms that feed wafers into the machine. The light source comes from Cymer, an American company bought by ASML in 2013. ASML is, in turn, one of hundreds of firms that supply the chipmakers themselves. But it is so vital that Intel, Samsung and TSMC have all chipped in to finance its research and development in return for stakes in the firm.
The Wikipedia entry is even crazier:
More:
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=47783
