0:00 America's coming for one of Europe's most important technologies. No, I don't mean the fax machine. I mean the machines that make the most advanced computer microchips. There is today only one company that produces them in the Netherlands. But soon that'll no longer be the case. The Dutch company ASML produces a special type of machine that's used to produce microchips. Almost all major chip producers use it. TSMC, Samsung, Intel, they all rely on this special machine. ASML has figured out how to use light in the extreme ultraviolet to print tiny structures on the silicon wafers that microchips are made of. The process is called
0:46 lithography or in this case extreme ultraviolet lithography. The extreme ultraviolet matters because it's got a very short wavelength. For ASML's machines, it's just about 13 nanometers. And shorter wavelength means one can print smaller details, so more powerful chips. ASMR's newest machines aim for even smaller structures at about 8 nanometers. Okay, but what's so difficult about ultraviolet light that no one else has managed to do this? Well, for one thing, you need to produce the light. And such short wavelengths are below the transition frequencies of outer electron shells. To get to these wavelengths, you need to rip a lot of
1:31 electrons off the atom. ASML does that by hitting tiny droplets of tin with a laser. The next issue is then to work with the light. Extreme ultraviolet light is absorbed by air, glass, and standard mirrors. So they have to work in a vacuum and they had to invent special mirrors to direct the light and then they have to do all this to utmost precision without the power supply of an entire city. This is why ASMR's machines cost hundreds of millions of dollars a pop. It's also why no one else sells anything remotely similar. And of course the rest of the world doesn't like that. The boldest attempt to break ASML's monopoly comes from an American company called Substrate. They say they want to
2:16 accelerate electrons with a particle accelerator. The way one does that is to accelerate the electron in one direction and then add a modulating field in the transverse direction. The electron moves in a wavy line basically and an electron moving that way will emit highly energetic light which is what substrate wants to work with. It's called a free electron laser. They're aiming at radiation in the soft X-ray range. So that's a wavelength about a tenth of what ASML uses and consequently the structures that they might be able to produce could be about a factor 10 smaller. Substrate hasn't shared technical details but the accelerators you need for this are typically a few ten of meters long depending on how good
3:02 the magnets are. ASML's machines are something like 10 m long and have the size and shape of a bus. Substrates are likely going to be larger. They say on their website that they direct the light with perfectly polished optics, which is about as vague as it gets. So far, the only thing they've produced is an image of a prototype chip with about 12 nanometer structures. There are other newcomers to the game. The American company XLite, for example, has the more modest goal of trying to find an alternative for ASML's light source with a similar technology as substrate, a free electron laser. but they specialize in making that laser small and efficient and they want to get about 20 beams out of one laser. It isn't really new technology, but it's a specialized
3:48 adaptation that could go places. And it's not only America ke Japan's high energy accelerator research organization has a program for a free electron laser for future lithography. Japan also has a very different approach from Canon called nano imprint. Instead of creating the pattern on the nanochip with light, they create a mold and then reuse it. Canon says its machine can make lines 40 nanome wide today and may reach 10 nanome with better templates. Then there is China doing it the Chinese way by trying to copy the ASML machine. They reportedly have a prototype that can generate the right type of light, but it's not yet produced working chips. So no, ASML is not about to collapse
4:35 tomorrow, but it's very likely that its monopoly will erode in the coming years. In any case, if Europe loses this advantage, it can always fall back on its other great technological achievement, making websites ask you about cookies. If you ever get the feeling that the news is more about storytelling than facts, Ground News is worth a look. Ground News is a news platform for people who value facts. They collect and summarize news which has been published all over the world. They collect all articles on the same story in one place and give you a quick summary which is a huge timesaver and they give you a lot of extra information that you don't find in the standard media. This recent story is a good example for what makes ground news so
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