"It is quite a colossal piece of equipment – so large, in fact, that it requires 13 truck-sized containers and 250 crates just to transport it. And once assembled, the machine is 3 stories tall, which has required Intel to build a new (and taller) fab expansion just to house it. It is estimated that each of these High-NA EUV scanners comes with a hefty price tag, likely in the range between $300 million and $400 million."
Just wondering how small a machine doing -somewhat- similar job could be made (in theory, at least) if throughput or cost/IC produced was not a major concern.
Along the lines of what a dude named Sam Zeloof has done in his garage. But with significant funding/research to miniaturize, streamline & cheapen the equipment involved.
Yeah, if you want to mass-produce billion+ transistor cpu's at a few nm. node @ competitive cost/cpu, talk to ASML.
But what if say, ~100k..10M transistors would do the job, only a few IC's are needed, and the machine were allowed weeks to fabricate it? How small and/or cheap could you go, if process & equipment for that were thoroughly optimized?
If you relax several manufacturing & design constraints, you can go from requiring a $3bn facility to something that can be made in a high-end lab or even a fancy garage.
There are smaller-scale techniques for EUV light generation. E.g.:
The time constraint is probably the most severe one. If you are willing to wait a week for your wafer to get dosed for every layer, you have a lot more options available than a foundry does.
Just wondering how small a machine doing -somewhat- similar job could be made (in theory, at least) if throughput or cost/IC produced was not a major concern.
Along the lines of what a dude named Sam Zeloof has done in his garage. But with significant funding/research to miniaturize, streamline & cheapen the equipment involved.
Yeah, if you want to mass-produce billion+ transistor cpu's at a few nm. node @ competitive cost/cpu, talk to ASML.
But what if say, ~100k..10M transistors would do the job, only a few IC's are needed, and the machine were allowed weeks to fabricate it? How small and/or cheap could you go, if process & equipment for that were thoroughly optimized?