- We're here at ASML in San Diego where they have possibly
the most advanced machine on the planet.
Inside the processors of your phone and computer
are billions and billions of transistors
that are only nanometers in size.
How can they possibly create something that's that small?
By shooting molten tin
with the world's most powerful CO2 laser
50,000 times a second.
Yeah. In here, they design and build the tools
that are used by chip makers
to build the most advanced processors in the world,
and I cannot wait to show you everything.
Minus whatever their lawyers cut.
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(upbeat music)
- When you hear AMD or NVIDIA
are producing seven nanometer chips,
it is really easy to just be like,
"Well, yeah, they always keep on making smaller transistors
every single year, and technology goes on."
But how the heck do they make a transistor that small?
With great difficulty.
The whole process is kind of like a big overhead projector
from school.
There's a light source that goes through the image
that you want to project,
and then there's some mirrors and lenses
that make sure everything arrives on the screen in focus.
Only difference is that for lithography,
the light source is one of the world's most powerful lasers
and the screen is silicon.
Since the early 2000s,
chip makers used 193 nanometer deep UV light provided
by an argon fluoride laser.
Even in 2001, they're already making transistors smaller
than 193 nanometers.
How the heck can you etch something
that's smaller than the wavelength
of the light that you're using?
The most important equation for all of this
is Rayleigh's Resolution Criterion.
This equation here is what tells us the smallest detail
that is possible to create
for a given optical system and wavelength.
Over the next 20 years through more advanced optics,
imaging through water on top of the wafer,
printing a single layer multiple times,
and using strange looking chip patterns,
chip makers were able to continually make smaller
and smaller transistors.
At some point though,
the wavelength is going to be a problem,
and if you don't address it, you might, I don't know
get stuck making 14 nanometer chips
for the next seven years. (coughs)
Now creating light with a smaller wavelength
than 193 nanometers is not very difficult.
For instance, they do it all the time
in X-ray machines at hospitals.
The problem though is those X-rays famously go
through everything, including mirrors and lenses.
Not fantastic if you plan on using in an optical system.
Now, it turns out 13.5 nanometers or extreme ultraviolet
is basically the smallest wavelength that you can use
that still mostly bounces off of mirrors.
Producing this 13.5 nanometer EUV light though
is what the incredibly smart folks here
at San Diego have figured out.
There are multiple ways to create 13.5 nanometer light,
but the best way is to blast tin with a laser
and turn it into plasma.
The problem with just pointing a powerful laser
at a block of tin though is that along with EUV light
you've also just, well, you blasted tin with a laser.
There's enough liquid and gaseous tin flying all
over the place to ruin just about anything,
let alone a lithography machine
that can be taken down by a single piece of dander.
Since shooting a block of tin was out of the equation,
the folks at ASML had the insane idea
to fire liquid tin droplets at over 275 bar,
and then shoot it with an insanely powerful laser twice.
The first laser pulse is called the pre-pulse,
which hits the tin droplet just hard enough
to change it from a spherical droplet
into more of a pancake shape
which maximizes the amount of 13.5 nanometer light produced
emitting a bunch of that sweet sweet EUV
The plasma is made right at the focus point
of this concave mirror, which is specially layered and coded
to ensure only 13.5 nanometer light
plus or minus 2% gets reflected,
and sends 150 watts or more of EUV
into the guts of the lithography machine.
Anyway, let's go look at that big ass laser.
Before that though I need to get all suited up,
and in a lot of factories you put on PPE
to protect yourself from the machines.
Although here, we're protecting the machines from us.
Just a single hair blow a laser up.
Terrible, I'm telling you.
Make sure arms don't hit the ground.
Look at how rad these shoes are.
I joke that they're trying to protect the machines,
but clearly they're also pretty good at work safety.
Do you imagine if we fell in a hole
and injures set back to zero?
Oh my God.
This entire room is a laser made by TRUMPF in Germany
that powers the EUV light source.
When the tin is shot into the chamber,
there are multiple detectors that need to figure out
the location and velocity of the droplets
with micrometer and nanosecond precision.
This location data is used to time when the laser fires,
which starts right here.
Now this is the seed laser,
which is only a couple hundred watts.
From here, it goes through a bunch of isolation optics,
and then it ends up in a power amplifier.
This guy right here.
On its own, this power amplifier can operate
as a 25 kilowatt continuous laser,
and it was actually designed to weld cars together
on production lines.
Here though, they have excited the CO2,
so when the source laser gets fired,
the amount of photons gets massively multiplied
like 10 to the 11 times.
They then run the beam
through three more power amplification stages
just to make sure that they can truly
and completely annihilate some tin.
In total, this laser delivers 25 kilowatts,
but that power has averaged pulses over several seconds.
Instantaneously, it's about 20 megawatts of power.
Here the laser and the light source are on the same level,
so you can see it goes across here, down, and over.
But in an actual fab,
this laser would likely be stored in the basement,
and then pump several floors up to this source.
There is a critical problem with this approach though.
On their own, the four power amplifiers don't care
which way the light is traveling,
and will very happily amplify a signal going in reverse.
Tin is also quite reflective,
so in the early prototypes, some of the laser bounced off,
got amplified by all of these amplifiers,
and then lit the source laser on fire.
Not the desired outcome to say the least.
To overcome this, they have employed literally
every passive and active isolation technique
to ensure that no reflected laser light makes its way back
through the amplification chain.
Here we can see the liquid tin delivery system.
The tin travels through this tube under immense pressure
and is shot through a minuscule nozzle at 275 bar.
On the tip of the nozzle is a tiny piezoelectric crystal
that vibrates in such a way
to ensure that the droplets come out
in a very specific strand that later combines into droplets
that are perfect for laser sniping.
This entire process happens 50,000 times
every single second.
So right here's the actual droplet generator unit.
So on the top you can see the heater,
and then this big old gun barrel looking thing
is where all of the liquid tin gets shot out of.
Originally, they used to use a solid piece of tin
and heat it up before shooting,
but that required turning the machine off
to reload it every so often.
Huge problem.
Now, the whole system uses liquid tin,
which can be much more easily replenished
for extremely low downtime.
Since these EUV lithography machines
are the most expensive parts of the fab,
about 150 to 200 million a pop,
they're designed to be the bottleneck
of the entire operation.
This means anytime the EUV machine is down,
the entire fab goes down and heaps of money is lost.
For hundreds of millions of dollars of investment,
it makes sense that these things need to work
24 hours a day, seven days a week,
and all maintenance downtime needs to be planned in advance.
Currently, ASML has achieved nearly 90% uptime
with their EUV machines,
and they're on track for 95% uptime by 2025.
What we see behind me right here is the source.
So this right here in an actual fab
is the light source for the whole lithography machine.
So right here, that right there is the metrology unit.
So that sees how much light they're making,
the quality of it, they can test it out,
see how well they're doing.
But normally, this will be sent straight into the guts
of the big old EUV machine.
Behind me, they're doing droplet generation qualification.
So that means that they're shooting the tin out here
and having a look at it
to make sure everything is working just fine.
And it also means that we can see the tin
that's going through.
It just looks like a tiny little spider web,
but all of that just a tiny, tiny little pieces of tin web.
(beeps) micron?
- [Staff] Yes. - Yes.
Are we allowed to say that?
To qualify the droplet generator,
they have a camera there with the shutter speed timed
with the droplets that are coming in.
So we can see these two dots right here.
And as long as no nonsense around it, she's good to go.
They look at this for four hours.
If there's any problems, then back to the lab.
Of course, the problems aren't over yet.
We just hit a piece of tin with the laser hard enough
to make it hotter than the surface of sun,
and it only takes a couple shots
before everything gets too hot
and everything's covered in a massive tin.
Now, the collector mirror is water cooled,
but that has more to do with temperature stability
than the heat of the plasma.
To deal with the heat, instead of water cooling,
they pump hydrogen gas through the floor.
This hydrogen absorbs the energy of the laser interaction
and then gets sucked out the top of the machine
along with all the bits of unvaporized tin.
Two new problems though.
First is that the more hydrogen that enters the vessel,
the more energy you lose, meaning you can only use
the exact amount of hydrogen that you need
or you're going to lose a bunch of efficiency.
And as a bonus, when the hydrogen is close to the tin,
when it gets lazed, the H2 molecules get ripped apart
into two hydrogen free radicals,
which are then scattered across the innards of the source.
If those hydrogen free radicals hit some of the liquid tin,
it will start to bubble and explode,
so more liquid tin everywhere and terrible time.
Basically, the hydrogen cleanup team needs
to do a really good job to ensure
that everything gets carried out quickly and completely.
or your 1.3 million mirror will have a very expensive trip
to the cleanup room.
Everything we've talked about so far though
is only the first step of the lithography machine.
The light bulb, so to speak.
In the past, for the PUV light,
they would use a series of lenses
to properly focus the light,
but EUV just gets absorbed by lenses and also most mirrors.
To overcome this, ZEISS created the world's flattest
and probably most expensive mirrors.
By layering silicon and molybdenum,
they were able to bounce almost 70% of the incoming light,
meaning the system needs to use as few mirrors as possible
to maintain high efficiency.
Just delivering a circle of light though wasn't enough.
Some features can be better etched
by using a different pattern.
So using an array of micrometers
is how they delivered that in the past.
How they do it for EUV?
I don't know, they wouldn't tell me for IP reasons.
The light then bounces off of the radical,
which is four times larger than the target,
and makes its way onto the target,
which is held on a magnetically levitating platform.
While that is getting printed, a second wafer is measured
to ensure it is placed with nanometer accuracy
and so that the downtime between prints
is only a couple of milliseconds.
The process then continues with each print,
either the positive or negative the image, is imprinted.
The wafer is then polished to remove the photo resist,
and the whole thing starts over again.
As soon as possible, they will move from EUV
to an older process node.
Not just because the older nodes are cheaper,
but also because at the end of the day
we need to end up at the size of a wire.
Sadly, you can't solder to seven nanometer.
Here they aren't just researching
how to build EUV light sources though,
they're building the final components
that will be used in production
at TSMC, Samsung, Intel, or Micron,
A lot of the components are assembled by hand
by highly skilled technicians.
Although over time each process is slowly being automated
to take human error out of the equation.
Over 40% of the parts get recycled and reconditioning here,
which makes sense given that even the housings
of the components can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,
and they take care of even just routine maintenance.
Yeah, it turns out that they empty the tin
into these super cheap water bottles
that are just off AliExpress.
Wow, that is heavy.
I can't pick that up.
In theory, we could probably just hook it up
to an LTTT water bottle.
Although I'd recommend just sticking to water.
lttstore.com.
From here, the source is shipped to the Netherlands
where it is assembled and tested
with all of the other EUV scanner components
from across the world.
The final EUV machine is then shipped to the customer
via three full 747s and 20 transport trucks,
where hopefully it will crank out cutting edge chips
for years to come.
In the future,
ASML will start shipping high NA EUV machines.
So this is a source for one of those right here.
And the concept is similar to what we've already seen,
but with improved optics and reliability
based on improvements they've found
over the last couple of years.
It is likely EUV will be the last wavelength required
for lithography since with future improvements,
the limiting factor of the resolution
will become the size of atoms.
From there, the only real option is quantum,
but that's a discussion for another day.
Anyway, huge thanks to Ryan and Alex
for spending a bunch of time with us
and answering all of my dumb questions,
as well as Abhiram, Andrei, Liane, Giulia, Pete,
and everyone else here at ASML San Diego.
Oh, and of course I couldn't forget to thank our sponsor.
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If you like this video, hit like, get subscribed,
and maybe go check out our Intel fab tour.