News China Aims to Use Particle Accelerators to Build Chips and Evade EUV Sanctions

[Admin]

China seeks to replace traditional lithography used to make chips with a particle accelerator.

China Aims to Use Particle Accelerators to Build Chips and Evade EUV Sanctions : Read more

 

[gg83]

Enough of these articles. Please stop copy and posting crud from untrustworthy "news" organizations.

 

[rluker5]

So what would having the laser run around an additional circle have to do with the lithography? Maybe it would be a different way of doing the first part of getting the beam handy, but don't they also do a ton of stuff to get the pattern sized and focused and keep the beam clean?

Seems like a lot of extra work for no good reason. Like if you sold your old GPU on Ebay and shipped it to Indonesia, then Brazil to get some added stickers before it made it's way back to the buyer in the next state over.

I suppose a more apt comparison would be if I found a new light bulb treatment for my video projector that was the size of a bookshelf and tubed that into where the bulb would go in some other brand projector because that new bookshelf bulb would somehow make a better picture? A bookshelf sized bulb contraption doesn't seem like a reinvention of the projector that is doing the light manipulation for the picture. it is ancillary.

 

[gg83]

So what would having the laser run around an additional circle have to do with the lithography? Maybe it would be a different way of doing the first part of getting the beam handy, but don't they also do a ton of stuff to get the pattern sized and focused and keep the beam clean?

Seems like a lot of extra work for no good reason. Like if you sold your old GPU on Ebay and shipped it to Indonesia, then Brazil to get some added stickers before it made it's way back to the buyer in the next state over.

I suppose a more apt comparison would be if I found a new light bulb treatment for my video projector that was the size of a bookshelf and tubed that into where the bulb would go in some other brand projector because that new bookshelf bulb would somehow make a better picture? A bookshelf sized bulb contraption doesn't seem like a reinvention of the projector that is doing the light manipulation for the picture. it is ancillary.

Perfect analogy.!

 

[TJ Hooker]

So what would having the laser run around an additional circle have to do with the lithography? Maybe it would be a different way of doing the first part of getting the beam handy, but don't they also do a ton of stuff to get the pattern sized and focused and keep the beam clean?

Seems like a lot of extra work for no good reason.

The laser (EUV beam) isn't what's circulating in the accelerator. It's a particle accelerator, not a light accelerator (which wouldn't make sense).

You need a suitable EUV source for EUV lithography. This is not trivial; it took ASML decades to get a working method. A particle accelerator is apparently another method for generating EUV suitable for lithography. They're not just doing it for fun, they're doing it because they can't use the same type of source as others due to sanctions.

I suppose a more apt comparison would be if I found a new light bulb treatment for my video projector that was the size of a bookshelf and tubed that into where the bulb would go in some other brand projector because that new bookshelf bulb would somehow make a better picture? A bookshelf sized bulb contraption doesn't seem like a reinvention of the projector that is doing the light manipulation for the picture. it is ancillary.

It'd be like if you couldn't buy a normal projector bulb, nor could you buy the parts to make a normal bulb yourself. So you come up with a different light source, because otherwise you can't use your projector.

I have no idea how effective this setup with be for generating EUV for lithography. But it seems pretty obvious what they're trying to do and why.

 

[BFG-9000]

Well we could make antimatter in particle accelerators too if we wanted to, for only a NASA estimated cost of $62.5 trillion per gram.

Perhaps they are willing to pay the price to produce a Potemkin village of a phone like the Mate 60 just for bragging rights, but it seems an unlikely method to produce saleable and profitable products.

Hmm, would you rather be able to thumb your nose at sanctions, or produce a photon torpedo?

 

[TJ Hooker]

Well we could make antimatter in particle accelerators too if we wanted to, for only a NASA estimated cost of $62.5 trillion per gram.

Antimatter is already being made in particle accelerators, and it didn't cost trillions of dollars. Do you have a source for that estimate? Maybe they were estimating to produce some large amount (e.g. a kg of antimatter).

Antimatter | CERN

home.cern

 

[Darkoverlordofdata]

And in another article, you state that they have issues raising money for current technology.
Maybe this is more like the Starwars/Strategic Defense Initiative - they are luring US down the same rabbit hole.

 

[BFG-9000]

Antimatter is already being made in particle accelerators, and it didn't cost trillions of dollars. Do you have a source for that estimate? Maybe they were estimating to produce some large amount (e.g. a kg of antimatter).

Antimatter | CERN

home.cern

So far, CERN has made less than 10 nanograms of antimatter and at that rate (which is ~1 nanogram per year if the accelerators are used to do nothing but produce antimatter) would take 1 billion years to produce 1 gram. Production of antimatter at a reasonable rate using particle accelerators would therefore require covering much of the earth in particle accelerators and the energy infrastructure to power them, hence NASA's estimate of $62.5 trillion per gram

The efficiency of antimatter production in particle accelerators is so low that about 1 billion times more energy is required to make antimatter than is finally contained in its mass. Using E = mc^2, we find that 1 gram of antimatter contains:
0.001 kg x (300,000,000 m/s)2 = 90,000 GJ = 25 million kWh
Taking into account the low production efficiency, it would need 25 million billion kWh to make one single gram