Search This Blog

Friday, January 02, 2026

EUV lithography - a couple of quick links

Welcome to the new year!

I've written previously (see here, item #3) about the extreme ultraviolet lithography tools used in modern computer chip fabrication.   These machines are incredible, the size of a railway car, and cost hundreds of millions of dollars each.  Veritasium has put out a new video about these, which I will try to embed here.  Characteristically, it's excellent, and I wanted to bring it to your attention.


It remains an interesting question whether there could be a way of achieving this kind of EUV performance through an alternative path.  As I'd said a year ago, if you could do this for only $50M per machine, it would be hugely impactful.  

A related news item:  There are claims that a Chinese effort in Shenzen has a prototype EUV machine now (that fills an entire factory floor, so not exactly compact or cheap).  It will be a fascinating industrial race if multiple players are able to make the capital investments needed to compete in this area.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Also, if you're able to do it at <100M$, you'd get stinkin' rich ..