Highlights
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2024-11-24 14:14 That 7 nanometer range, 7 nanometers is about the difference between what you can theoretically achieve with something called deep ultraviolet, which is an older lithography technology, and extreme ultraviolet, which is the new one.
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2024-11-24 14:14 if you’re using deep ultraviolet, you’re using EV radiation light to basically etch it. The problem with DUV is it can only be so specific. It can’t go down to the atomic level. And it requires a lot of hands on engineering in order to operate. So human error is always there.
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2024-11-24 14:14 Extreme Ultraviolet is a technology developed by asml, that’s the Dutch lithography company, to get around these problems.
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2024-11-24 14:14 And so all of the really good chips that we want for things like artificial intelligence and electric vehicles and your iPhone are all made using euv,
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2024-11-24 14:15 DUV can be used to make chips usually in the 10 nanometer to 90 nanometer range. That can go into a much wider array of factors where you don’t need as much memory or as much processing power or parallel processing capacity. Until recently, we thought that DUV really couldn’t go past about 10 or 12.
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2024-11-24 14:15 But the Chinese have proven that if they really want to brute force it, they can make it go down to seven. And Huawei came out with a phone about a year ago that used a 7 nanometer chip that came out of a DUV process. Huge power hog, very expensive. The price of the chip per computation was among the highest on the market, but they were still able to do it, and that spooked some people.
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2024-11-24 14:13 we’re seeing a coalition of the Dutch, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Americans, the Taiwanese to draw a line at EUV technology, because if the Chinese can’t get into it, then all of the cutting edge technologies of today are beyond them