Tin Plasma Extreme Ultraviolet Radiation Makes 5nm Integrated Circuits Possible

If you&#x27;re interested in chip fabrication, I heartily recommend watching <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;NGFhc8R_uO4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;NGFhc8R_uO4</a> - it goes over the evolution of how they make transistors all the way up to 2009 state of the art, with a follow up talk in 2013 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;KL-I3-C-KBk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;KL-I3-C-KBk</a>).<p>Both of them mention how Intel is sinking billions of dollars into ASML to try and get this process working, and how impossible everyone thinks it is, so I&#x27;m skeptical that they finally got everything squared away now :)

Reading this, I realized that I have no ability to differentiate actual in use fab technology from science fiction. What the engineers and scientists do in modern fabs is in my mind more impressive than the entire Apollo program.

A tidbit, a one of more lunatical proposal for the next gen fab design is to build it around a multimegawatt cyclotron, and have the light source problem &quot;solved for good&quot;<p>The genuine problem with tin plasma laser is its power efficiency. An early adopter runs can bare with 0.02% energy efficiency, but imagine, say, a few 20 line fabs and their power consumption.<p>Another very important advantage of this design would be getting a more stable, easily tunable, and more narrowband light source. Tin plasma has around 1nm deviation in its spectrum, while a cyclotron can get to picometres on an arbitrary wavelength.<p>And with all above, you get a supremely tempting option to try diffractive optics, and do away with all geometry imposes nonsense of EUV reflective optics...

One of the applications of shear-flow stabilized Z pinches is to generate short wavelength light from xenon plasmas.

Why are people putting lots of effort into extreme UV generators when we could just use x-rays? We know plenty of ways to generate and focus x-rays...

For the curious: 100,000,000 transistors per square millimeter, from the site.

What if we utilized the 3rd dimension just a wild idea. Also designed chips as long rectangular, more surface area.

Let&#x27;s do hard gamma lithography already.

I can imagine on a few decades company&#x27;s data center on a single square meter chip :)