America is Coming for Europe's Most Important Machine

[00:00] America is 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  

[00:13] one company that produces them in the Netherlands.  But soon that will no longer be the case. The Dutch company ASML produces a special  type of machine that is used to produce  

[00:25] 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  

[00:37] light in the extreme ultraviolet to print tiny  structures on the silicon wafers that microchips   are made of. The process is called lithography,  or in this case extreme ultraviolet lithography.

[00:51] The extreme ultraviolet matters  because it has a very short wavelength,   for ASML’s machines it’s just about  thirteen nanometres. And shorter   wavelength means one can print smaller  details, so, more powerful chips. ASML’s  

[01:07] newest machines aim for even smaller  structures at about eight nanometres. Ok, but what’s so difficult about ultraviolet  light that no one else has managed to do this? and such short wavelengths are below the  transition frequencies of outer electron  

[01:27] shells. To get to these wavelengths you need  to rip a lot of electrons off the atom. ASML   does that by hitting tiny droplets of tin  with a laser. The next issue is then to  

[01:40] work with the light. Extreme ultraviolet light is  absorbed by air and glass and standard mirrors.   So they had to work in a vacuum and 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. 

[01:57] This is why ASML’s machines cost hundreds of  millions of dollars a pop. It is 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 ASMS’s monopoly  comes from an American company called Substrate.  

[02:15] They say they want to 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 on a wavy line,  

[02:29] basically. 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 are aiming at radiation  in the soft X ray range,  

[02:42] 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  

[02:58] typically a few tens of metres long, depending  on how good the magnets are. ASML’s machines   are something like 10 metres long and have  the size and shape of a bus. Substrates are  

[03:10] 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   have produced is an image of a prototype  chip with about 12 nanometre structures.

[03:25] There are other newcomers to the game. The  American company xLight 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  

[03:40] 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 adaptation that could go places.  And it’s not only America. KEK, Japan’s High  Energy Accelerator Research Organization,  

[03:56] has a programme for a free-electron laser  for future lithography. Japan also has   a very different approach from Canon called  nanoimprint. Instead of creating the pattern   on the nanochip with light, they create a mold  and then reuse it. Canon says its machine can  

[04:13] make lines fourteen nanometres wide today, and  may reach ten nanometres with better templates. Then there is China, doing it the Chinese  way by trying to copy the ASML machine.  

[04:26] They reportedly have a prototype that  can generate the right kind of light,   So no, ASML is not about to collapse tomorrow. But   it’s very likely that its monopoly  will erode in the coming years.

[04:40] 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,  

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