If you were wondering what the hell EUV (Extreme Ultra-Violet) stood for:
waferscope.com/duv-vs-euv-whats-the-real-differen…
This table from the link sums it up pretty well:
China Has Reportedly Built Its First EUV Machine Prototype, Marking a Semiconductor Breakthrough the U.S. Has Feared All Along
Submitted 3 weeks ago by just_another_person@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://wccftech.com/china-has-reportedly-built-the-first-euv-machine-prototype/
Comments
snoons@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Using shorter and shorter wavelengths of light to etch chips with a higher density of transistors.
NatakuNox@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Less material for greater performance, for those that want more simplicity.
ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I wonder what the next generation will be called…EUV2TM perhaps?
Kirp123@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I assume they will move from UV to X-rays.
ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Typically 10NM is the cutoff for what you’d call x rays.
NatakuNox@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Ya but we have the ten commandments in classrooms! Check mate
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
And the nations Press Secretary to the President did a degree on a softball scholarship. Fusion power imminent!
NatakuNox@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Hey hey, getting those 10,000 year words on the walls shows peak GOP political speed.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.”
SabinStargem@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
little_tuptup@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
so, no jetpacks?
MuskyMelon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
I’m from the school of “capitalism stops progress when there’s not profit to be made”.
So all these things could have come true if someone didn’t stop them because they were going to lose money.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Dead_or_Alive@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This above all things. The number of inputs required to build a microchips is insane. There are probably 2 to 3 thousand separate vendors who are part of this process all of which produce highly specialized products. Not to mention the fact that all silicon used to produce chips is currently mined in a single quarry in South Carolina.
China might be able to make a fab, but the inputs required to make chips are too diverse for any single nation to build 3 or 4 nm chips at scale by themselves.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Cut off a nation as big and determined as China and they will just become more self sufficient.
lechekaflan@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Given how the US has become more and more isolated as it turns hostile towards immigrants and what is called the Global South, of course the Mainland Chinese will befriend and establish trading deals with any country alienated by Trump. Like, for example, Taliban Afghanistan’s mineral deposits.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
Nations can’t be determined.
Anyway. Yes, but there’s nuance, China is not heaven on earth.
SabinStargem@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
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 EUV machines. They are an incredible linchpin of our modern world.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
narinciye@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
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.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
The technology behind these 4nm chips and most of the lithography technology comes from EU.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Mainland Europe has never had a culture of computer hardware development or manufacture. They’ve been coasting on the United States and Britain since WWII. Name me a CPU architecture developed in the EU. There’s one, ARM. British.
Furthermore, Europe just doesn’t have the work ethic to run a chip fab. You know those attempts to bring fabs to the United States? They’re running afoul of American labor laws, turns out American citizens won’t work 14 hour days like the Taiwanese. You lazy ass Europeans with your 51 weeks of vacation a year don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making your own CPUs.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
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.
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
China’s not going to invade anything, popular support for peaceful reunification is higher than ever and the US is giving Taiwan and the rest of the world new reasons to distance themselves from us all the time. All China has to do is sit back and watch as we voluntarily shit the bed, they’ll get Taiwan and probably more with no sanctions or bloodshed.
jumjummy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What are you talking about?
checks instance name
Yeah that tracks. No, support for Taiwanese unification with China is not gaining support. Look at the posturing China is doing with its military. Look at the steps Japan is starting to take to prepare for this possibility.
SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If China invades Taiwan then that’s WW3
MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Why? Trump won’t do anything. What other countries have protection treaties?
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Have Intel and Samsung stopped making chips recently?
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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 nearly every computer and smartphone. They have nearly 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, TSMC is practically your only real choice.
7isanoddnumber@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
“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.
themurphy@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Long time ago that was true.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
China has made massive breakthroughs. In chips, SMIC/Huawei are advancing impressively in terms of products, but it is unclear how good yields/costs are, even if they are shipping commercial products.
Still, this PR does give hints that this is Garage hacked EUV with cannibalized parts they cannot make yet, and 4 year time scale is far out enough. There was PR of EUV breakthrough this spring too, and don’t recall if this claim is additional advancement over that.
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Delusional, pure cope
Gigasser@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
theneverfox@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
And even then, it’ll need to be commerically viable to compete with the West.
Well, unless they invaded Taiwan…
_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
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.
MuskyMelon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
All they have to do is to make it good enough and cheap enough to commodotize the product which will flood the market and push the most advanced but expensive tech to the side.
utopiah@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Meanwhile ASML just stops doing R&D and give up on its extremely specialized supply chain. /s
flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Did anyone think they would not?
Given enough time it’s inevitable any determined organization could make it.demonsword@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I hope the can deliver on consumer hardware as we really need some competition here.
trolololol@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
BS. Untied states are not competitive at all for a long time. They should say China is catching up with Taiwan.
Schmoo@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
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.
ManixT@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Who are the imperialists?
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
These machines are made only here. They are owned by a company in the Netherlands, though.
disconsented@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
That’s not true, the reason why Taiwan is so far ahead is because of the US and the contributions from LLNL. That’s part of how they’ve been able to force ASML to not sell to China.
trolololol@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m going to paraphrase you.
Taiwan/ASMC is advanced because usa wants Taiwan to be advanced in detriment of usa being advanced, and no other country in the world is helping Taiwan, specially Netherlands.