Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- How come we don’t make chips with really small 3d printers?by bilsbie
- AFAIK you can't really print crystalline silicon so they have to start with a wafer and dope/etch into it to form transistors.by wmf
- The closest thing there is is e-beam lithography. It isn't really practical.by tbrownaw
- Sibling has a good comment about silicon. Another reason you're printing something like 100B transistors. So that's at least 100B raster steps. It would just take too long.by dehrmann
- I wish that, but for high performance RISC-V micro-achitectures.by sylware
- by dismalaf
- Is it so hard to explain what the term "High-NA" is supposed to mean at the start of your article?by ginko
- most importantly, is Ian Cutress' blog basically the new Anandtech? I miss that site...by caycep
- > ASML moved to camera-style anamorphic optics that magnify the mask by different amounts along the two axes
Does this mean they do high-resolution designs in the center of the lens and low-resolution designs in the periphery?
by amelius - Im rooting for Intel. I hate the current paradigm where all the best chips are made in one factory in Asia.by dyauspitr
- Intel is doing well. They have 18A yields up to 85% at Fab 52. That's huge for the foundry business: the best foundries are not all in Asia now.
Rumor is they're moving Nova Lake production mostly in-house due to 18A success.
by topspin - yeah - I wouldn't bet against Intel.
they might have floundered in the past.
panther lakes I hear are pretty competitive with some of the apple silicone.
by dzonga - IMO it's competition that makes better products in the end. If either party becomes a full monopolist the progress will stall (as already happened with Intel I guess)by nasretdinov
- Tsmc are opening 10 factories in USA at cost of $265bn
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-tsmc-us-investment...
Intel staying strong is still vital for competitiveness though
by fsuts - I was just reading about this in a tech magazine, couple of startups also trying other techniques of interest, one of them using helium atoms for the lithography. This uses pretty close to x-ray wavelengths of light. Amazing feats of engineering taking place in this crazy world of ours.by johndear223
- Amazing looking machine! $380 million a pop. Must surely be one of the most sophisticated machines humanity has ever built? A great achievement of European science and technology (ducks).by rando1234
- That's what makes this hard to interpret. The whole strategy of intel is that they have their own version of this machine, part of their "18A" design. The only reason they need the ASML machine is because of the "optics" (between quotes because at the frequencies they work at no optics work - only (bad) mirrors do. However you need make the mirrors accurate enough - we're talking far more accurate than the chips, as in sub-nanometer max deviation, they can function as optics with high losses, but low enough that exposure works). No American company can achieve even 10 times lower accuracy at the moment.
So is this giving up on their own version? That would mean their stock price is absolutely not justified at $110, and it should be more like $60-70 if not lower. Or is this "we have technical reasons to use this. We're still going to do 18A and it's still going to beat 2nm", which would mean their stock price is easily justified at $200 and it's high time to buy.
by spwa4 - Basically most of the technology was US govt funded at some point. Now the Dutch can just leech off of that. I guess that’s what they’re good at considering their long history with VOC and “mercantilism”.by lvl155
- > A great achievement of European science and technology (ducks).
It's a fantastic machine but the bulk of the achievement is clearly a joint European-American effort.
by arcticfox - The lasers are made in San Diego, the lenses made in Germany.by johndear223
- Depends on definition of machine. Do ISS, LHC or ITER count?by mDyJzDPmBdG
- > Amazing looking machine!
As with most of this type of technology, most of the stuff you see is basically a giant refrigerator and giant vacuum cleaner. The actual meat is much smaller and hidden from view.
by amelius - EUV was developed in a joint venture with the Department of Energy and ASML, Intel, etc called EUV Corp. It’s why the US can export control it.by throwup238
- > A great achievement of European science and technology
It's an amazing piece of technology but this is... wildly wrong. ASML is a multi-national company that licenses IP largely from USA and Japan, but also Taiwan and Germany. The actual EUV light source is developed and produced in California by Cymer, which ASML acquired in 2013. But ASML was only permitted to acquire the company under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement with the US government. Additionally, a huge portion of the photolithography research is directly developed (and owned) by US companies and research organizations such as IBM, Albany NanoTech, and SEMATECH.
There is a reason why ASML's next-generation research photolithography machine is currently being installed and developed in upstate New York, and not somewhere in the Netherlands. The same reason that Cymer is still in San Diego instead of being relocated to Europe. Because it's American technology.
But Europe certainly plays a huge role in it.
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-n...
https://research.ibm.com/blog/euv-center-albany-nstc
https://www.eetimes.com/asml-sematech-team-on-manufacturing-...
https://www.eetimes.com/asml-to-build-400-million-us-researc...
by petcat - I believe Intel has a winner with the upcoming Crescent Island GPUs with up to 480GB of LPDDR5 memory. A lot of SMEs will need local AI with large open weights models (i.e. >1.5TB of VRAM), but they don't need a watercooled 8x Nvidia GB300 box. Besides, it's difficult to deploy and very expensive.
Crescent island is air cooled and likely fast enough for a group of users running something like GLM 5.2 or Kimi K3.
by Tepix - I mean, I sure as heck can't buy a nVidia one, at least not the founder editions which are the one that fit in my case...by caycep
- I thought Nvidia after they invested in Intel killed Intel’s GPU efforts as it could be a threat to Nvidia’s GPUsby gigatexal