[pclmulqdq]

There are some theoretical approaches that you could use to make e-beam a lot faster, and I'm not sure anyone has really explored them due to the unreasonable effectiveness of photolithography. Basically, SEMs and e-beam machines today use a low- or medium-power electron beam that they treat as a static beam, and scan slowly to keep the "static" assumption. If you instead think if it as a traveling particle stream, you may be able to "pipeline" the process of steering the beam as it travels down the microscope, allowing you to crank up the power and run the process a lot more quickly. It would be very cool to see a startup pursue super-fast e-beam and make it work, and it's a niche I'm excited to see explored.

[alted]

A common approach is to use multiple electron beams in parallel ([1] is up to 262144 beams!). This is starting to be used commercially to create the masks for photolithography.

[1] https://www.ims.co.at/en/products/

[chrisjc]

Interesting. So I wonder what it is that Atomic Semi is attempting to do that is novel/different/unique?

[ruslan]

AFAIK, the best performance IMS were able to achieve with the 512x512x50nm e-beams was 1cm^2 per hour. That's acceptable for etching masks, but still not feasible for chip manufacturing, as wafer goes through 40-50 exposures each would be taking days to complete.