Post by Baron von Lotsov on Jun 6, 2023 21:52:46 GMT
The current state of the art is TSMC's 3nm process using ASML's EUV lithography machines at a cost of about $150m each, but now the US has banned the supply, crippling Huawei's mobile phone business and much more. The US is believed to have done this for military reasons. High end computer chips and AI could give it a military advantage and this is all the US cares about. The way the US stops China building its own EUV machines is by banning US companies from licencing the technology, making EUV impossible.
However there is another way, and this other way is ingenious. Think how a Fresnel lens works. Instead of say a normal lens you have a series of concentric rings which cause interference patterns in the light that make it function as a lens. Holographic images work on this principle too where the image is reconstructed from the interference patterns. Now lets say you do this using nano technology. This is the genius step in the idea and what you get is called a meta lens. This video gives you an introduction to what one of these looks like and shows you it in operation.
That was 4 years ago. The big news in China now comes from Tsinghua University where it is said they have used this technolgy to replace the EUV machine and actually create better chips than the ones they were banned from making and using by Uncle Sam.
I have another report on this here
I appreciate the above 2 videos are a bit garbled, but combined with the first one you should be able to get a rough picture of the state of play. I had a hunch there was another way around this, but I had imagined Nano Imprint Lithography would be the route, except the Japs hold the IP on that as they are the inventors. NIL can do down to about 5nm currently so this scheme seems to blow all others out of the water and will probably replace lenses all over the place, e.g. camera lenses and so on.