[armada651]

It is actually relatively easy to make a lithography machine that can etch features beyond what EUV can do. You simply use an electron scanning beam rather than photons.

It's what the industry uses to create the masks used in lithography machines, but it could just as easily be used to make the actual chip. The problem is that it doesn't scale, at all. A scanning process is way too slow to be useful in mass production.

Thus you should always be skeptical when someone says they've built a machine that beats ASML's machines, because that's actually the easy part. The hard part is scaling it up.

[epicureanideal]

Interesting! Makes me think of old 1990s X-Files episodes with chips under a microscope “smaller than we can produce”.

I wonder if the government makes small batches of bespoke chips that are super miniature based on non scalable processes, and how far back in time would they have been able to develop 1nm chips for example?

[rwmj]

The TV series could have been true! Even in the 1980s we could push individual atoms around, albeit very very slowly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope#...)

[armada651]

The node sizes have become more of marketing term, so it's more useful to look at the half-pitch resolution when doing comparisons. In 2007 researchers demonstrated they could reach a 15nm half-pitch using an electron scanning beam. [1] Whereas ASML reliably achieved this resolution using EUV around 2017.

Thus in the early 2000s you would be about 10 years ahead using electron scanning beam lithography. However that assumes you have all the tooling and transistor designs to actually create a working chip at that resolution. Showing you can etch a feature at nanometer scale is one thing, actually using it to create a working chip is a whole other ball game.

[1] https://spie.org/news/0599-double-exposure-makes-dense-high-...

[15155]

Patterning is just one of many issues.

[LarsDu88]

At best they will manufacture masks. But that was already the "easy" part right?

[fennecbutt]

Lmao no it's not "relatively easy"

Funnily enough Asianometry just did a video on tsmcs new masks and how the machines involved WERE particularly hard to develop, "Multi-Beam Mask Writer" that uses hundreds of thousands of electron beams (after splitting) to accomplish its task.

Nothing about that industry is easy.

[armada651]

Emphasis on the "relative", I meant relative to actually developing a successor to EUV that can be used in mass production.