• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

The Most Important Machine You’ve Never Heard Of Can Etch Lines 10,000 Times Smaller Than A Hair

December 3, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Etching seems like such an old-fashioned technique (for a time it was also an Olympic competition) that you don’t normally associate it with cutting-edge technology. However, integrated chips used in all our electronic devices get etched, with patterns printed on a silicon wafer. And there is one machine in the world that does that.

Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography (ASML) is done by Dutch multinational corporation ASML Holding, a company that has virtually no competition on the subject of Extreme ultraviolet lithography. This is the printing technique to create the smallest and most complex chip designs. The company is capable of etching designs as small as 8 nanometers. By comparison, a human hair is around 80,000 nanometers thick.

Advertisement

The printing is crucial to the chips. The grid of etched lines created by the machines is not just for show. The printing creates multiple electronic components such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors – crucial in the functions of integrated circuits. The size of these chips is finite because the size of our tech is finite especially when it comes to things like mobile phones. So the more you can etch on a single semiconductor, the better your chip is – and to etch more you need to go smaller.

This is why the machine uses extreme ultraviolet light. The laser light of this plasma has a wavelength of around 13 nanometers, close to the (arbitrary) beginning of X-ray light. Clever optical systems are used to shave off a few nanometers. There are approaches to go even further but this can’t be repeated forever. Eventually – not too far into the future – the quantum and thermodynamic effects of single silicon atoms (which have a diameter of 0.26 nanometers) will stop the etching from going any smaller.

So clever designs such as three-dimensional integrated circuitry or better software or different structures will have to compensate for the limits that physics has imposed on this technology. Still, the company will continue to send out its incredible machines so that tech companies can print their chips.

ASML Holdings’s monopoly is truly an anomaly – an anomaly that can have far-reaching consequences. They are a powerful company and they are extremely influential given that everything these days has a silicon chip inside. Their machines are very big and we have found out what happens when something stops the flow of trade – the chip shortage of the last few years is the continuous effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Advertisement

Extreme ultraviolet lithography is a technology essential to everything we do, but very much unknown far and wide. The single supplier of the machine that makes all the integrated chips in the world has a crucial and dominant role.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. China Evergrande shares slide 6% in early trade
  2. Indonesia’s new carbon tax signals higher power costs amid calls for clarity
  3. Lake Tahoe Has Flipped, Here’s What That Means
  4. 380-Million-Year-Old Fanged Fish Found In One Of The World’s Oldest Lakes

Source Link: The Most Important Machine You've Never Heard Of Can Etch Lines 10,000 Times Smaller Than A Hair

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • A Spinning Island Lake In Argentina Looms Out Of The Swamps Like An Eyeball
  • Mammals Have Evolved Into Ant Eaters 12 Times Since The Dinosaurs Went Extinct
  • Thieving Pulsar Spinning 592 Times A Second Reveals New Understanding Of Where Its X-Rays Come From
  • The Rise And Fall (And Lamentable Rise) Of The “Alpha Male” Myth
  • IFLScience The Big Questions: How Do Black Holes Shape The Universe?
  • North America’s Smallest Turtle Is The Cutest Thing You’ll Find In A Bog
  • “Unambiguous Signal” To Curb Emissions Now: Long-Lost Aerial Photos Reveal Evolution Of Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapse
  • 8 Children Have Been Born With 3 Biological Parents Each After Mitochondrial Transfer
  • First Known Observations Of Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry In Special Particle Decay
  • In 1973, NASA Sent Two Spiders Into Space To See If They Can Spin Webs – And They Learnt A Lot
  • Meet The Many Species Of Freaky Looking “Assassin Spiders” That Only Eat Other Spiders
  • Your Dog’s TV Preferences Might Reveal Their Personality
  • Some Human Gut Bacteria Can Absorb Harmful Toxic “Forever Chemicals” So They Can Be Pooped Out
  • You Could Float Through 10 Countries Before The World’s Most International River Spat You Out
  • Enormous Coronal Hole And Beast-Like Crawling Prominences Dazzle On The Active Sun
  • Dramatic Drone Footage Of Iceland’s Latest Volcanic Eruption Shows An Epic Scene From Hell
  • A Shrimp That Lives In A Tree? Indonesia’s Cyclops Mountains Are Home To Some Seriously Strange Wildlife
  • Is NASA’s Claim That Saturn Could Float On Water Really True?
  • Pangea Proxima: This Is What Planet Earth May Look Like 250 Million Years In The Future
  • The Story Of Dogxim, The Fox-Dog Hybrid That Shouldn’t Have Existed
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version