“The Decision of the Century”: Choosing EUV Lithography

Errata:
2:28 - I should make more clear differences between Proximity and Projection Lithography. Both have a gap, but projection includes a lens

Links:

[nekomakhea]

Personally, I really enjoy the lithography videos. There isn't any other content like this on YouTube.

[MikeGaruccio]

Sad to hear the lithography videos don’t seem to do well. They’re some of my favorites and I hope you can find time for a few more.

[nicholaselliott]

Don’t shy away from more lithography videos, obviously if they add insight (which you have a keen sense for), you have shown you are the guy to make them. Thanks!

[glenyoung]

I appreciate these technical level videos you’ve put out there.
They have the same tone and ‘flavour’ as the old articles from pre-1995 Scientific American.
They aren’t meant for technical specialists already in the industry but they aren’t fluff videos which give little new understanding, the audience are more sophisticated non-specialists willing to use their brains to learn something new.
Your videos require the viewer to actually ‘think’ about the material and do a little work at trying to grasp the content.
Well done.

[spartacoos]

I know it sucks when your video doesn't seem to get appreciated by the masses, but you're doing great work here. There are a thousand economic/tech history channels. What you put out with these is unique. Perhaps consider making these for a separate channel, or make a series?

[edsmithson]

One small correction: As you said, first came contact printing, and then they provided a small gap between the mask and the wafer. This is call proximity printing. This greatly reduced defects. But to get to even more resolution, they moved the mask away from the wafer and put a lens in between the mask and the wafer. This is what is called projection printing or lithography. The image of the mask is projected onto the wafer. This was done at first across the whole wafer. To further improve resolution, they made step and repeat systems to project onto a small area of the wafer at a time. These are the steppers that we have to this day, but of course with increasingly higher resolution with every generation of the steppers.

[Thderk]

No please do not stop these! I love the nitty gritty tech lore!!! I hope others feel the same because you do a very good job on delivering highly technical articles in a way my smooth brain can comprehend.

[AltoidsYob]

Patreon supporter here. I would actually love EVEN MORE lithography content, in even more gratuitous detail. That's one of the main things I'm here for and I really hope you continue to do videos like these. Good luck and thanks for your insights!

[percyvile]

These videos are amazing, there's so little good content about the semiconductor industry. I can't even begin to imagine how much research this takes and the headaches of trying to access a lot of it (proprietary information and such). Thank you.

[mymodularjourney]

Your Lithography videos are what brought me to the channel in the first place.
There are very few others that provide this level of detail and insight in this crucial industry.

[lurkingstar]

for what it's worth, I love the lithography-focused videos

[williamstearns]

I love your videos on EUV! I studied engineering, and still the entire process, the machines, the insane precision required, everything, still seems almost magical.

I don’t want LESS videos on the technology related to EUV. I want more!

[michaljurkovic]

IMS Vienna afterwards switched from ions to electrons a created multibeam mask writer, which also allowed writing complex layouts on EUV masks in approx 10h, much shorter than with VSB writer.

[kirkfranklinboy]

I am not 100% sure how I found your channel but your presentation style. It’s awesome. And I’m learning so much. Please don’t stop.

[legit]

I really enjoy these lithography videos, they are insightful and technical without being inaccessible. Your semiconductor videos probably give some of the best and most historical overview on the topic on the internet. I'm always happy to see them.

[samgeorge]

Keep up the great work, your videos are in a class of there own. Almost 500k!

[shmookey]

I agree with others' sentiment: please don't stop doing lithography videos, especially coverage of new developments. As you acknowledge, staying across this stuff requires a ton of research, and that's a tremendous gift to pass on - and you have a tremendous gift for conveying it. Your coverage is more than just insightful - it's an antidote to the frustration I share with many downstream consumers, to whom today's market conditions often elicit a certain cynicism of ignorance, which is a burden - "enlightening" would be a better word.

I appreciate that you have to consider viewership in choosing the topics you invest so much time on. In light of that, I pledge to increase my level of support on patreon and perhaps others who would wish for a continued focus on these less popular topics can do so too (and let you know). I don't care about membership tiers and special benefits: the content is special enough.

[sooocheesy]

I work on photolithography equipment and personally never thought the day would come that EUV - with high cost/insane optic specs/stochastic defects/relatively low throughput - would be a mass market tool. Which really it isn't - there are only 3 or 4 companies using it at scale - due to "the 'juice not being worth the squeeze". It's simply too expensive and too few applications exist where EUV somehow improves the chip performance enough to justify the price. Plain old i-Line/248/193/193i DUV still makes the vast majority of chips you use today and will use in the future.

I suspect we're nearing the end of the road where we can keep making chips faster/cheaper by making them smaller. EUV will probably be the last generation of chip making equipment intended to go smaller and smaller, and quantum tunneling issues will determine at what size we stop.

[lesourire]

... maybe less popular, but probably the most important. I was a coder in the early 80’s, writing the code that controlled the wafers traveling into and out of the quartz tube (on a quartz ‘boat’) to be heated, exposed to various gasses, etc. I moved on, but still code (a lot). It’s beyond remarkable how so many tools I wished I had access to then and over the years, are now so available.

Knowing the historical steps, ie, the what, why, when and where, etc, is hard to bring together. But you are serving up that history in a way that’s easier to digest than most sources. I’ve been surprised when you present other topics in such a similar way. They are all fascinating ... please don’t avoid this one though. It’s really the center pin so much advancement in every other arena.

[benmcreynolds]

It's crazy how photons, electromagnetic Wave's, frequency, energy, vibration, mass. Are such fundamental aspects of EVERYTHING in our Cosmo's.