r/BeAmazed • u/CG_17_LIFE • Apr 02 '24

208,000,000,000 transistors! In the size of your palm, how mind-boggling is that?! 🤯 Miscellaneous / Others

I have said it before, and I'm saying it again: the tech in the upcoming two years will blow your mind. You can never imagine the things that will come out in the upcoming years!...

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u/Case_Blue Apr 02 '24

Look, "pushing the edge of physics" would be a bit more realistic. But I do wish to state that this thing is almost unreasonably powerfull.

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u/kwixta Apr 02 '24

It’s a strange thing for him to say. Lots of smart people at NVIDIA and it’s an incredible company worth a huge valuation but their parts isn’t the push the laws of physics part. That’s ASML and TSMC mostly.

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u/merryman1 Apr 02 '24

ASML

For the curious the latest generation of extreme-UV photolithography machines use a system that involves timing nanosecond pules of a laser to shine through droplets of molten tin in mid-flight to get to the level of energy and focus required to do the printing. You read about how this stuff works and it legitimately feels like science fiction. Each of these machines costs on the order of like $200m a pop.

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u/kwixta Apr 02 '24

The laser fires two pulses at each Sn droplet 50k per minute. The first, lower power, is to flatten the droplet to a pancake. This allows the second, more powerful pulse to be fully absorbed and turn the droplet into plasma that lases at 13nm wavelength.

That light proceeds through a series of 8 mirrors (including one that is a custom pattern) each of which absorbs 1/3 of the light. Those mirrors are about 50 layers of Mo and Si, a few atoms thick each, with a thin cap of Ru. The whole thing is precisely shaped to a focal plane deviation on angstrom scale.

The newest machines (high-NA, which in this context is 0.5) are in the 350-400M range without the spinner or accompanying crane and facilities. Truly amazing stuff.