The Engineering Of The World's Most Important Machine

[John Clark]

The details of ASML's $400 million chip lithography million machine are just amazing, for example:  

In order to keep chip production high and economically viable the machine must accelerate a chip several inches at 25G and then stop it at a position that is accurate to within five silicon atoms. To the eye the movement is so fast it's just a blur. 

It needs several mirrors that are so smooth that if they were the size of the planet Earth the highest mountain would be no taller than the width of a playing card. 

Each second the machine needs to blast a stream of 60,000 tiny droplets of molten tin, that are moving at 160 mph, 3 times with a laser so that every single droplet becomes 40 times hotter than the surface of the sun and produces the extreme ultraviolet light required, and it must keep this blistering pace up 24/7 for months at a time, and it must never miss a single shot because a laser miss could damage the machine. And all that vaporized tin is being produced just a few inches away from one of those very delicate, super smooth, hyper expensive mirrors, so a way needed to be found to keep the vaporized tin from hitting it. 

And the list of monumental engineering requirements continues. You would think ASML could never get it all to work, but after 20 years and nearly going bankrupt they eventually figured out a way to not only make it work but make it economically practical. If ASML hadn't figured out how to do this the AI revolution would not be happening, so I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that not only is it the world's most complex machine it is also the world's most important machine.   

The Engineering Of The World's Most Important Machine

On a related topic I also found this to be interesting: 

Semiconductors made in space could be 'up to 4,000 times purer' than Earthly equivalents

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

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