This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
when discussing when China could catch up to the US in the semiconductor race.
BS. Untied states are not competitive at all for a long time. They should say China is catching up with Taiwan.
And it's not a race, there's no finish line, improvements have been happening for 50 years now and can continue for decades.
That's just the imperialists telling on themselves. They don't consider what is Taiwan's as Taiwan's, but as being made exclusively for the US' benefit.
These machines are made only here. They are owned by a company in the Netherlands, though.
If you were wondering what the hell EUV (Extreme Ultra-Violet) stood for:
https://waferscope.com/duv-vs-euv-whats-the-real-difference-in-chipmaking/
This table from the link sums it up pretty well:
Using shorter and shorter wavelengths of light to etch chips with a higher density of transistors.
Less material for greater performance, for those that want more simplicity.
I wonder what the next generation will be called...EUV-2TM (EUV-2 THE MAX) or SEUV (Super EUV) perhaps?
I assume they will move from UV to X-rays.
Can't use X rays, they don't focus easily and blow through the wafers. The whole technology of semiconductors is hitting a wall anyway at <4nm because too dense and electrons will jump the transistors. This scale on nano fabrication is incredible and very cheap for what it is, but we are hitting a limit.
We're getting close! EUV is currently ~13nm, and soft xrays start at ~10nm (but go all the way down to ~0.01nm for hard xrays.)
Sadly there a lots of challenges in transitioning to smaller wavelengths. For example, to get the EUV light in the existing process, we're already resorting to, essentially, exploding tiny droplets of liquid tin using lasers.
No, X-rays are too energetic.
Photolithography is basically shining some kind of electromagnetic radiation through a stencil so that specific lines are etched into the top "photoresist" layer of a silicon wafer. The radiation causes a chemical change wherever a photon hits, so that stencil blocks the photons in a particular pattern.
Photons are subject to interference from other photons (and even itself) based on wavelength, so smaller wavelengths (which are higher energy) can fit into smaller and finer feature size, which ultimately means smaller transistors where more can fit in any given area of silicon.
But once the energy gets too high, as with X-ray photons, there's a secondary effect that ruins things. The photons have too much leftover energy even after hitting the photoresist to be etched, and it causes excited electrons to cause their own radiation where high energy photons start bouncing around underneath, and then the resulting boundaries between the photoresist that has been exposed to radiation and the stuff that hasn't becomes blurry and fuzzy, which wrecks the fine detail.
So much of the 20 years leading up to commercialized EUV machines has been about finding the perfect wavelength optimized for feature size, between wavelengths small enough to make really fine details and energy levels low enough not to cause secondary reactions.
Okay but Japan had a major breakthrough the other day that made this technique obsolete for the majority of components.
I mean if every headline about massive breakthroughs was the full truth all our appliances would be powered by tiny nuclear power plants and we would fly around with our jetpack. Cancer would be but a distant memory and world hunger a non issue because vertical farms would be literally in every home.
Average East-Asian news cycle:
China: “We are preventing the export of rare earth minerals to strengthen our country.”
US: “We are imposing tariffs to strengthen our economy.”
Japan: “22-year-old undergraduate turns a leaf into a battery.”
What was the Japanese breakthrough? Got a link?
Ya but we have the ten commandments in classrooms! Check mate
And the nations Press Secretary to the President did a degree on a softball scholarship. Fusion power imminent!
What happens to Taiwan when China is competitive on chips?
I could see them deciding to invade, Taiwan destroys their fabs, and then China gets a monopoly but also sanctions.
The west ultimately ends up unable to build chips and China has a global monopoly.
Have Intel and Samsung stopped making chips recently?
Taiwan being invaded would make the current component shortages look like nothing in comparison. TSMC fabricates the vast majority of high-end chips used by basically every computer and smartphone. They have a two-thirds market share while the next biggest player, Samsung, has around 10%, and Intel barely registers. If you want high-yield nanometer-scale precision manufacturing, TSMC is practically your only real choice.
Cutting edge chip making is several different processes all stacked together. The nations that are roughly aligned with the western capitalist order have split up responsibilities across many, many different parts of this, among many different companies with global presence.
The fabrication itself needs to tie together several different processes controlled by different companies. TSMC in Taiwan is the current dominant fab company, but it's not like there isn't a wave of companies closely behind them (Intel in the US, Samsung in South Korea).
There's the chip design itself. Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, and a bunch of other ARM licensees are designing chips, sometimes with the help of ARM itself. Many of these leaders are still American companies developing the design in American offices. ARM is British. Samsung is South Korean.
Then there's the actual equipment used in the fabs. The Dutch company ASML is the most famous, as they have a huge lead on the competition in manufacturing photolithography machines (although old Japanese competitors like Nikon and Canon want to get back in the game). But there are a lot of other companies specializing in specific equipment found in those labs. The Japanese company Tokyo Electron and the American companies Applied Materials and Lam Research, are in almost every fab in the West.
Once the silicon is fabricated, the actual packaging of that silicon into the little black packages to be soldered onto boards is a bunch of other steps with different companies specializing in different processes relevant to that.
Plus advanced logic chips aren't the only type of chips out there. There are analog or signal processing chips, or power chips, or other useful sensor chips for embedded applications, where companies like Texas Instruments dominate on less cutting edge nodes, and memory/storage chips, where the market is dominated by 3 companies, South Korean Samsung and SK Hynix, and American company Micron.
TSMC is only one of several, standing on a tightly integrated ecosystem that it depends on. It also isn't limited to only being located in Taiwan, as they own fabs that are starting production in the US, Japan, and Germany.
China is working at trying to replace literally every part of the chain in domestic manufacturing. Some parts are easier than others to replace, but trying to insource the whole thing is going to be expensive, inefficient, and risky. Time will tell whether those costs and risks are worth it, but there's by no means a guarantee that they can succeed.
Haven't China also claimed a lot of impossible tasks like Cold Fusion, cure for cancer, and breaking most modern encryptions?
Might want to remain skeptical for now.
The EU should secure a deal with Taiwan. The US has already tried to extort money of Taiwan by threatening the removal of protection. For the sake of democracy's power and prosperity, the EU should offer to officially protect Taiwan. Having access to quality chips is key to all sorts of things.
Anyhow, the channel 'Asianometry', has a video covering the physics of EUV machines. They are an incredible linchpin of our modern world.
The EU does not have the military capacity to protect Taiwan.
That's not mentioning that the EU is not a military alliance. That's the first political challenge to tackle.
Anyhow, the channel ‘Asianometry’, has a video covering the physics of EUV machines. They are an incredible linchpin of our modern world.
So true. This stuff is absolutely mind-blowing. Especially if you are old enough to remember how some of that seemed like almost unsurmountable problems. Now the solution are used in mass production.
In the meanwhile, EU also have to focus on manufacturing of the chips themselves in the long run, instead of depending on a 20 million nation.
The technology behind these 4nm chips and most of the lithography technology comes from EU.
This seems about right. Progress was originally supposed to be 5-10 years. I'm not too sure on how effective these prototypes are. My guess is that their progress of EUV sources is quite far now, but that they'll still need to have greater progress in regards to domestically created collector & debris mitigation systems, projection optics, mask blanks and other things.
Edit Addendum: Note, article agrees with the timeline of 5 years behind for China. Since their EUV source(presumably) works differently from ASML's LPP EUV(many think China is going LDP route for EUV source), research may still go up to 10 years, as they will likely need to account for this when researching the other components in a full scanner. Alot of significant modifications or straight up new shit will have to be made. And even then, it'll need to be commerically viable to compete with the West.
And even then, it'll need to be commerically viable to compete with the West.
Well, unless they invaded Taiwan...
If Taiwan gets invaded they'll just blow their chip fabs, they've said as much multiple times and presumably have a plan in place to do it at a moment's notice. If that's what China is after I don't know that an invasion is going to work even if they succeed. It could deny future chip production to other countries though.
Yeah, that's what I mean
Doesn't matter if China's chips are economically viable if they're the only ones making advanced chips...
I mean, it kinda still does, but even if they did eventually invade, it wouldn't necessarily make China the only game in town. There are already other fabrication plants going up around the globe, an invasion would definitely accelerate their development.
China seems to be closest though, if they reach viable modern CPUs first...
But realistically, I think China made a deal with the West to hold off on Taiwan until we have at least one modern chip fab working in the US and Europe
I tend to agree, but leadership has been super questionable as of late
Yeah, but that would be like launching a nuke. The whole world is dependent on TSMC for like... All of modern life
Arizona has chip fabs coming on line, (damn Joe Biden!) but construction of a fab and actually making chips at scale are two very different challenges.
Cut off a nation as big and determined as China and they will just become more self sufficient.
Meanwhile ASML just stops doing R&D and give up on its extremely specialized supply chain. /s
Did anyone think they would not?
Given enough time it's inevitable any determined organization could make it.
Given enough time and an enormous budget it’s inevitable any determined organization could make it.
This kind of milestone isn't reachable by most countries in the world mostly because of the price tag attached to it
“China has reportedly built” Ok I’m gonna stop you right there. China reports it’s built a lot of stuff. It almost never actually builds anything.
