Professional, Ai Boom, Later Rate Risk A risk – There are many reasons that have made computer chips so expensive. But you may not have guessed that another major reason is the mirror. Further, in particular, the most perfect mirror inside the latest EUV lithography machines used to produce the latest chips.
Is in accordance with YouTube Channel AsianometryWhich has a deep dive in incredible engineering of the mirror used in modern chip manufacturing. The latest ASML machines, such as TSMC used its latest N4 and N3 chip production process and Intel for Intel 7 and 4 nodes, relies on highly ultra -violet light 13.5 nm.
Controling and paying attention to this light on silicon wafers – which, in simple terms, how do you stand a computer chip with a wafer. To reduce a long story, these machines use a mirror series to do so. Catch focus and reflection controls need to be valid within 260 pakometers or 0.26 nanometers, which is slightly smaller than 275 pakometers of water molecule.
It is accurate for 2660 packomers of the entire mirror system, which is 10 mirrors and depends on the sequence. Anyway, when you make money, you finish the worst, with the accuracy of the level required for each person’s mirror of the 53 -packometer. And this, according to Asianometry, is the smallest atom, like hydrogen’s nuclear radius.
So, how has this incredible accuracy been achieved? First, a substrate is created and polished for the desired geometry using traditional optical techniques but without full accuracy and consistency. The process, which is known about the ion beam, is then used to fired high energy particles on the substrate by firing high energy particles at the atom level.
Subsequently, the layers of the molibidinum and the silicon are just a few nanomeometers collected at a thick level, known as magnetic spare. This includes firing ions on the blocks of moldinum or silicon, which in turn remove atoms that can be made to settle on the substrate.
EUV light requires close to 50 replacement layers of molibidine and silicon to achieve the desired multi -layer construction interference reflection properties. If you are still maintaining, props, this equipment is complicated by hobby. And that means, it means that it is very expensive in the mind.
Of course, this incredibly accurate mirror series is just part of the EUV Lithography Machine. Another feature of the mind is the first place of the EUV light generation. Almost speak, it involves firing molten droplets, each of which is hit by a laser pulse, once to flatten the drop, the second time to make it vapors, the location at which the EUV lighting revealed 13.5 Nm wavelengths.
The whole thing is completely bananas, clean, which is why an ASML EUV machine costs millions of dollars and on factories or fees that cost billions of dollars.
Oh, and the chips going into our gaming machines are becoming more and more expensive. The TSMC makes the current GPUs, RTX 50-series and RX 9000 series of NVIDIA and AMD respectively, and uses incredibly expensive EUV machines of ASML to produce these GPUs. And so you now have a little better understanding why the graphics cards are so expensive these days. They are not the only reason, but they make an important contribution.
