Chinese semiconductor thread II

tokenanalyst

Brigadier
Registered Member

Cavity-based compact light source for extreme ultraviolet lithography​


Abstract​

A critical technology for high-volume manufacturing of nanoscale integrated circuits is a high-power extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light source. Over the past decades, laser-produced plasma (LPP) sources have been actively utilized in this field. However, current LPP light sources may provide insufficient average power to enable future manufacturing at the 3 nm node and below. In this context, accelerator-based light sources are considered to be promising tools for EUV lithography. This paper proposes a regenerative amplifier free-electron laser EUV source with harmonic lasing, driven by a superconducting energy-recovery linac (ERL). By utilizing the th harmonic, the required electron beam energy is reduced to 1/√ of that in conventional schemes. The proposed configuration, employing an electron beam energy of approximately 0.33 GeV with a short-period (16 mm) undulator, is estimated to provide an average EUV power of about 2 kW. This approach significantly reduces the required electron energy and facility size relative to other accelerator-based proposals, thereby offering new possibilities for constructing high-power EUV sources with low-energy ERLs.

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tokenanalyst

Brigadier
Registered Member
I don't get it.
DUV and EUV are large state secret projects. How would important people at SMIC and CXMT be allowed to talk to an American insider who published regularly on twitter ?

There must be some OSINT involved in these projects.
Ahhhhh, Is that guy again, the one some here think is hvpc.
They don't have insiders, they rely on stock traders scammers like Leslie to get their "inside information"

View attachment 125091
I can't anymore.
We have to avoid posting from social media.
 

gadgetcool5

Senior Member
Registered Member
hvpc was not nearly as bad as predicting 20+ years.
Basically he says that his timeline comes from the need to run billions of product wafers and eating the water scrap costs, which would cost $1 trillion. Even if you had the money, how fast could you realistically run the wafers and iterate?

Second, he says a lithography prototype is worthless without matching tools. For example, EUV requires pellicle-free handling, vacuum-compatible storage, and defects inspection tools that are drastically different from DUV. How did these tools get created? He says it took decades of experience in KrF, ArF, wet and dry tools to create these.

And even at the DUV level, if you make a lithography machine that is not compatible with the other tooling in the fab, it can't be used. For example, Nikon is stuck at a 10% market share for its mature node lithography machines because they are not compatible with ASML tooling that most fabs already have installed. ASML's moat includes an ecosystem advantage at this point.

Also, he says SMEE's 28nm lithography tool isn't in use for volume production because it needs an immersion scanner for the "other layers", since 28nm needs immersion lithography for the smallest layers. And if you don't have immersion lithography technology, you can't do 28m.

Essentially, he points out that lithography development is an iterative process and you can't just magically skip steps. Then he asks at what step China currently is. KrF? ArF? I-line? You need the answers to these questions and due to opacity, we don't have them.

But I've never seen any report of any Chinese lithography machine used in volume production for commercial ends anywhere; not even the most primitive. He claims Huawei, for instance, has never even made a broadband stepper, which is 1980s/1990s technology. And no one has been able to refute him. And why would it? Huawei is a network gear and mobile phone company, not a lithography company. Because it has money and is a hardware company? That means little. By that standard, Boeing and Lenovo should be making lithography machines because they are hardware companies with deep pockets. There is no reason to think Huawei would have the background, experience or talent to do lithography. At the end of the day, if you want confidence in Chinese lithography, China is going to have to have the confidence to publicly announce that it has achieved so-and-so lithography process fully domestically sourced, and put it into volume production for some product that a member of the public can personally buy and physically hold and see working in their own hands. Otherwise it's going to be all smoke and mirrors. It's been over 5 years now of the chip war and and we're still at the smoke and mirrors stage.

That's why a better path for China might just be to go all out on quantum; that is a relatively new technology where there are not such big moats and can allow China to leapfrog the U.S. with sufficient effort. Rather than trying to copy the past in a Sisyphean effort that will only end up with them still behind.
 

antwerpery

Junior Member
Registered Member
He did dare people to bookmark his tweet though. Another Jordan Schneider in the making.
Basically he says that his timeline comes from the need to run billions of product wafers and eating the water scrap costs, which would cost $1 trillion.
People just don't understand that the speed of a project is determined by the amount of resources that the state can pour into it. And China can pour a lot of resources into a single project.

Using their own logic, the US crewed moon landing are fake. After all, America was years behind the Soviets in the space race, with the soviets taking very impressive milestones like first orbital launch, first living thing in orbit, first human in space, first robotic probe to land on the moon etc etc. All while America was basically building it's entire space program from the ground up. How the hell was America going to catch up to the soviets, who had such a large head start? And yet, due to the insane amount of resources America was pouring in, they still managed to outpace the soviets and land on the moon, all within 12 years of the space race starting. Even today, in 2025, no other nation has managed a human lunar landing and even America itself is struggling to return to the moon. Not because it's impossible or even that difficult with modern technology, but because nobody wants to spend the hundreds of billions needed to build everything up.

When China does get EUV within the next few years, it's gonna be the same thing.

"How the fuck did you catch up so fast?"
"Money"
 
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