Shadowing Practice: The Closest Thing We Have to Alien Technology - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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This is a microchip.
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When you zoom in, you find a nanoscopic computing city.
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Skyscrapers, hundreds of layers tall, with hundreds of kilometers of wires connecting everything.
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And at the very bottom is this.
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Transistors.
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Billions of them.
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They are the ones and zeros of our computer.
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The chip works by whizzing electrons from transistor to transistor.
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And the smaller you can make those transistors, the less the signals have to travel, so the faster they can compute.
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Plus, you can fit more transistors into the same area, resulting in a much more powerful chip.
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So for over 50 years, transistors got smaller and smaller, and the number you could fit on a chip doubled every two years.
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This became known as Moore's Law, named for Intel's co-founder Gordon Moore after he noticed the pattern back in 1965, and it's been one of the main drivers of the the tech industry.
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But around 2015, progress came to a screeching halt.
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And we might have never gotten past it if it wasn't for a single company that makes these machines, the machines that saved Moore's Law.
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Holy.
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This is a video about the most complicated commercial product humanity's ever built.
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That's insane.
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It costs a whopping $400 million and it is so bizarre that I want to introduce it to you with a thought experiment.
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Imagine you are shrunk down to the size of an ant.
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And you're given a laser that's strong enough to melt through metal like butter.
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Next, a tiny droplet of molten tin, roughly the size of a white blood cell, is shot out in front of you around 250 kilometers per hour.
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And your task is to hit this not once, not twice, but three times in a row in 20 microseconds with your little laser.
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Well, that is exactly what this machine does.
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It hits one tiny tin droplet three times in a row, heating each one up to over 220,000 Kelvin.
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That's roughly 40 times hotter than the surface of the sun.
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And it doesn't just hit one droplet.
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It hits 50,000 droplets every single second.
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How often do you miss a laser shot?
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We don't miss them.
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What?
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You do 150,000 laser shots a second, and you don't miss one.
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Exactly.
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The same machine also contains mirrors that might just be the smoothest object in the universe.
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If you scale one up to the size of the earth, then the largest bump would be no thicker than a playing card.
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On top of
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that, it is able to overlay one layer of a chip perfectly on top of another
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and never be off by more than five atoms.
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And this is all happening while parts of the machine whip around at accelerations of over 20 Gs.
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For 30 years, almost everyone thought that actually building this machine was impossible.
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And yet it exists.
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There is only one company in the world that can make it.
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So what is this company?
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And what is this impossible machine they've built?
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This video is sponsored by Brilliant.
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More about them at the end of the show.
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Now, just as a quick aside, the makers of this machine didn't actually sponsor this video.
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We just thought that the science and engineering here were so cool that we had to make a video about it.
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So let's jump straight in.
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To make a microchip, you start by taking silicon dioxide, usually from sand, and purifying it into ultra-pure,
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nearly 100% silicon chunks, which is then melted down in a special furnace.
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Next, you lower a small seed crystal into the vat, silicon atoms attached to the crystal, extending its structure.
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Then you slowly raise the seed crystal while rotating it, and this results in a large single crystal silicon ingot.
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This is where the seed crystal would be, and then you pull it out.
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Can I touch it?
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Yeah, you can.
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It seems like you would not be able to hold this from here.
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Yes.
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It even feels fragile, like if you kinda...
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Looks not good.
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Yeah, I'm scared to break it.
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Yes.
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He's using more force.
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The ingot is then cut into wafers with diamond wire saws, up to 5,000 of them, after which each wafer is carefully polished.
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Next, it's coated with a light-sensitive material called photoresist.
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There are different kinds, but in a positive photoresist, the areas exposed to light become weaker and more soluble.
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So if you shine light through a patterned mask, you can selectively weaken parts of that coating.
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Then you rinse the wafer with a basic solution to wash away the exposed photoresist, leaving the design imprinted.
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So now you can actually turn this pattern into physical structures.
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This is often done by etching into the uncovered silicon by using either chemicals or plasma.
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And then you deposit a metal like copper to fill in those etched lines.
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As a last step, you wash away the remaining photoresist, and now you've made a single layer of the chip.
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We've simplified this cycle down to the main steps, coat, expose, etch, and deposit.
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It repeats for every single chip layer, and depending on the chip, there could be anywhere from 10 to 100 layers.
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The bottom layer is the transistors.
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This is the most complicated layer requiring hundreds of steps that all need to be perfect.
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The higher layers are a little easier.
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These are the metal wires that carry signals and power.
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By the end, the completed wafer can have hundreds of chips, which are then cut into separate pieces, packaged and put into products.
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But by far the hardest
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and most crucial step in the process is where you shine light through the mask and onto the wafer.
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This is photolithography.
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And that's because this step determines how small you can make the features.
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At first, it seems simple.
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Light passes through the openings and it gets blocked by all the rest.
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But as you try to print smaller and smaller features, the gaps in the mask start to approach the wavelength of the light.
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And that causes problems.
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And we can actually show it because I happen to have a...
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This is a mask, this is a reticle.
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A reticle or a mask carries the design of one chip layer.
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This reticle is filled with microscopic lines and gaps around 670 nanometers across.
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And if I take like a laser pointer, so this is a red laser.
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If I shine it through it, then you see this here.
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The laser has a wavelength of around 650 nanometers.
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When light hits the reticle, its wave fronts bend as they pass through each gap.
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So each gap sends out waves that spread out and overlap.
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Now, let's just look at the light from these two gaps.
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When the peaks of one wave line up with the troughs of the other, we say that the two waves are outer-face and they cancel each other out.
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So you get dark spots.
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And when the peaks line up with the peaks, the two waves are in phase.
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They add up and you get bright spots.
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You get interference, right?
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And you get a diffraction pattern.
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Now diffraction is inevitable.
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So instead of fighting it, designers actually use it to get the patterns they want.
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They kind of work backwards from the eventual pattern they want on the wafer
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and they design the slits so that diffraction will occur in such a way that it creates the pattern that they want.
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You see three dots.
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The middle dot, that's the original one, that's the zero order, and then on the left and the right you can see the first and the minus first.
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Now in order for us to have this image resolved on the wafer, you need to capture the zero and the first and the minus first order.
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The smaller you make the features, the larger this angle alpha between the zero and first orders becomes systems, so the larger your lens needs to be to capture the light.
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The size of the lens is described by the numerical aperture, or N-A for short, which is just the sign of this angle.
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So the larger that is, the smaller the features you can print.
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But there is a hard limit to how large your lens system can be.
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When this angle is 90 degrees and your numerical aperture is 1, well your lens would have to be infinite.
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Fortunately, there is one other thing we can change.
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This is a red laser.
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Yeah.
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And a red laser has a wavelength of 650 nanometers-ish, I would say.
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Something like that, yeah.
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And if I take the green laser, and this one has a wavelength of 532,
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then you can see that the green dots are closer spaced than the red dots.
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That's because the light from the two different gaps doesn't have to travel as far to match up in phase again.
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So the orders end up closer together.
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So with a smaller wavelength you can print smaller patterns using the same lens.
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All of this is captured by the Rayleigh equation, which determines the smallest feature size or critical dimension.
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But since there's a limit to how much you can increase the numeric aperture, I mean to one, over time the only way to keep making smaller
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and smaller features is by using shorter and shorter wavelengths.
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So this is exactly what happened up until the late 1990s when the industry settled on 193 nanometer deep UV light.
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This was the light that was used to make all of the most advanced chips right until around 2015.
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But by that point scientists had reached the limit to how small they could make the features
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and Moore's law was about to run into a brick wall.
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So a radical change was needed.
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A change that had been brewing for around 30 years.
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All the way back in the 1980s, Japanese scientist Hiroki Yoshida came up with a crazy idea.
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Why not use much shorter wavelengths, like X-rays of around 10 nanometers?
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In theory, that should allow you to print much smaller features.
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But you quickly run into a problem.
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X-rays at these wavelengths have enough energy to eject electrons from their atoms, so most materials absorb them.
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But unlike medical x-rays, which have wavelengths shorter than one nanometer, these are still long enough to interact with air, so air absorbs them too.
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That meant that Kinoshita's setup had to be in a vacuum.
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But even worse, he couldn't use lenses to focus the light, because the lenses would absorb it too.
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So it seemed like this idea would never work.
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But around 1983, Kinoshita stumbled on a paper by Jim Underwood and Troy Barbie.
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Their work focused on special mirrors that could reflect X-rays with a wavelength of 4.48 nanometers.
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So Kinishida was intrigued.
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Curved mirrors can focus light just like lenses do.
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If he could figure out how to make these special mirrors for the wavelength he was using, then this could be another way to do photolithography.
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The mirrors work something like this.
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When light crosses from one medium to another, say from air to glass, it bends or refracts.
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Some of it goes through and part reflects back.
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How much gets reflected depends on things like the angle, the light's polarization, and most importantly for us, the difference between the refractive indices of the two media.
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The larger that difference, the more light is reflected.
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And Underwood and Barbie used that principle.
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They made a super thin layer of tungsten, less than one nanometer thick, thin enough that X-rays could pass through without immediately being absorbed.
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When X-rays hit the layer at a specific angle, the tungsten reflected less than 1%.
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Then they carefully tuned the layer thickness so the path length of the transmitted x-rays was only one quarter of its wavelength.
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Then they added another layer, this time out of carbon.
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It has a higher refractive index than tungsten for wavelengths of 4.48 nanometers.
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The x-rays hit the boundary and a little bit more reflects.
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But this time the phase is inverted or it's changed by half a wavelength.
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This happens when any light moves from a lower refractive index to a higher one.
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Now, by the time this new reflected wave reaches the tungsten boundary, it has traveled another quarter of its wavelength for a half wavelength in total.
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So the two phases line up and the waves interfere constructively.
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Underwood and Barbie kept doing this trick for a total of 76 alternating layers, so that in total, they could reflect back much more of the x-rays.
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Now, they only managed to reflect around 6% of the light, but it was a proof of principle that you could reflect X-rays.
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So, Kinoshita saw the possibilities.
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He got to work, and after around two years, his team designed and built three tungsten carbon curved multilayer mirrors to reflect 11 nanometer light.
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And with it, he managed to print lines four microns, or 4,000 nanometers thick, proving that,
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at least in theory, X-ray lithography was possible.
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A year later, in 1986, he went to present his findings to the Japanese Society of Applied Physics.
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Proud and excited, he explained his setup and showed his image.
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But to his horror, the audience refused to believe it.
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Unfortunately, the audience was highly skeptical on my talk.
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Kinoshida was devastated.
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He later said, people seemed unwilling to believe that we had actually made an image by bending x-rays, and they tended to regard the whole thing as a big fish story.
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Nobody believed that this was a viable way forward and unfortunately the reaction was at least somewhat justified.
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First, this light isn't naturally produced by anything on Earth.
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The closest natural source is the Sun.
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We had to basically build an artificial Sun here on Earth.
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Most scientists including Kinoshita produced x-ray light using a particle accelerator or a synchrotron.
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It gives an enormous amount of power.
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It's as big as a soccer field.
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You can fuel the whole feb.
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The problem is if the light goes out, the whole feb goes out.
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So each machine needed its own power source.
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But even if you could produce the light, you'd need to make incredibly smooth mirrors to actually focus and print those tiny features.
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You would need the smoothest objects in the universe.
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Okay, so I got a football and I've got a bouncy ball and a cobblestone street.
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Now, what do you think is gonna happen when I drop them?
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The football basically bounces straight up, but for the bouncy ball, it just shoots up to the side.
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And that's because the surface is relatively flat for the football, which is much larger, but it's super rough for the bouncy ball.
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And a similar thing happens with mirrors.
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If the surface is super rough compared to the size of the wavelength, then the light scatters randomly.
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Now, it might look smooth, but if you zoom into a mirror, you find something that looks like this.
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You find all these crazy bumps.
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And now to measure the roughness, what you do is you take the average of these bumps, and that will give you your mean line.
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Now, for a normal household mirror, the average height is about 4,000 silicon atoms.
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But for Kinoshita's mirrors, which not only needed to reflect x-ray light, which has a hundred times shorter wavelength, but also needed to minimize scattering,
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you know, so that all the photons make it onto the wafer, it needed to be way more smooth.
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It needed to be atomically smooth.
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In fact, the average bump could only be about 2.3 silicon atoms fig.
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If one mirror would be the size of Germany, the biggest bump would be about a millimeter high.
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But Kinoshida refused to give up.
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However, my belief did not change.
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And soon help would come from an unlikely place.
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Across the Pacific, around 70 kilometers east of San Francisco, is Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
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A lab that was born out of the Cold War, heavily funded by the US government, and built for one purpose and one purpose only, nuclear weapons.
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The lab was founded by the inventor of the cyclotron, Ernest Lawrence, and the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller.
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And over its lifetime, they designed over 10 fusion-type nuclear warheads.
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So part of their research focused on what happens inside nuclear fusion reactions.
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Fusion reactions released a lot of x-ray light, light that they had never been able to capture and analyze.
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But now, using those special multi-layer mirrors, there was a chance.
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One of the scientists tasked with making this work was Andrew Hoverluck, and within a few years, he and his team used multi-layer mirrors to reflect some x-ray light.
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But then in 1987, Andy got a visit from a professor from Cornell.
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very impressed with the technologies that we developed
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and he looked at me at the end of the day
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and said this is all very interesting and very neat
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and stuff but his words
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and I'll remember it to the day I died was can you do anything useful with this stuff?
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This was the day before a Christmas shutdown in 1987
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and I was so inflamed by that comment that I went home
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and for the next 10 days I wrote up a multi-page white paper.
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He applied these mirrors to lithography to print chips using x-rays.
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Around five months later, Andy presented his findings at a conference.
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But like Inoshita, it was not the response he was hoping for.
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It was extremely negative.
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That was the low point in my career.
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I was literally laughed off the stage and I kid you not.
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Every person who I looked up to in the field,
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they were listening to my talk and they came up to the microphone and told me basically why it wouldn't work, how stupid an idea it was.
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Later that week I flew back
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and the following Monday my boss asked me how did it go
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and I looked at him and I said I will never speak of it again.
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But then three days later he gets a phone call from someone named Bill Brinkman from from Bell Labs.
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So I walked over to my boss and I said, I just got this phone call from a guy named Bill Brinkman, you know who he is?
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And my boss's eyes popped open and said, yeah, he's the executive vice president of AT&T.
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And I said, well, he just called me and asked me to fly out to New Jersey and give a talk.
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The response from my boss said it all.
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He basically said, well, you gotta go.
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At Bell Labs, Andy found fellow believers, and it couldn't have come at a better time.
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Over the past 30 years, the US government had invested billions of dollars into national labs to maintain the country's technological edge during the Cold War.
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But by the late 1980s, the Cold War was slowing down.
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And all these labs were sitting on research that had commercial potential.
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So the government encouraged the labs to partner with US companies to turn that research into products and to stimulate the economy.
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And the government would then supply seed money.
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And so Bell Labs partnered with Andy's Labs and two others to keep developing X-ray lithography.
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And by 1993, the first international conference for X-ray lithography was held in Japan, near Mount Fuji.
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In the opening address, Kinoshita said that as long as we do not lose the desire that has sprung from within us, technology will steadily advance from the micro,
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to the nano, to the pico.
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They even gave the technology a new name, Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography, or just EUV.
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But then in 1996, the US government cut funding for the project.
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This spelled disaster for the big chip companies like Intel.
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The industry estimated that the 193 nanometer lithography tools would fall behind Moore's law by 2005.
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But there were no other alternatives.
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So Intel, Motorola, AMD and other companies got together and invested $250 million to keep it going,
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making it the largest investment ever by private industry in a Department of Energy research project.
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By the year 2000, the labs had produced this, the engineering test stand.
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It was the first fully functioning EUV prototype.
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It produced 9.8 watts of 13.4 nanometer EUV light, which was then reflected by eight mirrors from the source to the mask to the wafer.
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It could print 70 nanometer features and it proved that EUV could work.
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It was a milestone to get the engineering test stand to work.
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It demonstrated to people like Intel that, you know, good engineering will get us there.
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And it seems like you've got the prototype.
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Shouldn't be too hard to then commercialize it.
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That's what they thought.
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But the prototype had a major flaw law.
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It could only print about 10 wafers per hour.
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And to make EUV economically viable, it would have to print hundreds of wafers per hour, 24-7, 365 days a year.
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The main reason output was so slow was because the light reflected off of eight mirrors and the reticle, which is also a mirror, just with the design imprinted.
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Traditional masks that allow light to pass through don't work because, well, they absorb all the light.
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Each mirror had a reflectivity of around 70%, which is close to the max, but after 9 bounces, you're only left with 4% of the light.
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Which means that out of every 100 photons, only 4 make it to the waver.
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So you might think, just use way fewer mirrors.
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But that only works up to a point.
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When you focus light with any optical system, you always get some distortion.
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For example, rays that pass through the outer edges of most lenses focus light slightly different from those near the center.
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This is called spherical aberration.
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And normal cameras correct for this and other aberrations by using multiple lenses.
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And a mirror system is no different.
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You need to have a certain amount of mirrors before you can say I have my aberrations under control.
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In reality, the systems of today have six mirrors.
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That helps a little, but after reflecting off six mirrors and the reticle, you're still only left with around 8% of your light.
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So they needed to drastically increase the source power to at least 100 watts.
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Now to most companies, that tenfold increase seemed impossible.
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Even people who worked on the engineering test tent noted that while EUV technology itself is a done deal,
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there were six zillion engineering challenges to make it a fab-line reality.
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And so one by one, American companies walked away from developing a full UV lithography machine.
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That left just one company, ASML.
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ASML, which used to stand for Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography, is located in a small, nondescript town in the Netherlands.
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It spun off from Philips back in the 80s with little more than a shed
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and a barely working wafer stepper to its name.
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But Philips also gave them people, Jos Benshoop, ASML's first researcher, and Martin van den Brink,
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who would eventually become ASML's CTO and EUV's greatest champion.
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And he's really like the Steve Jobs of lithography.
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And he saw EUV coming.
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ASML had joined the US EUV consortium earlier, and now it became their task to find a way to commercialize EUV.
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They would work together with their German partner Zeiss, where Zeiss would take care of the mirrors, and ASML would focus on the light source.
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One of the first decisions when making any lithography system is deciding which wavelength to use.
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In the early days, anything between 5 and 40 nanometers was explored.
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The thing is, you need to find a source, and you need to find optics that reflect the wavelengths.
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So you have to look for the combination.
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Underwood and Barbie had already made mirrors that could reflect light of around 4 nanometers.
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And since that wavelength is so small, it seems like the obvious choice.
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But the maximum reflectivity for those mirrors was only around 20%.
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So after hitting six mirrors and the radical, you're just left with 0.00128% of the light, which is way too low.
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Fortunately, further researchers also looked at two other pairs.
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Silicon and molybdenum, which had a theoretical maximum reflectivity of 70% for wavelengths around 30 nanometers,
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and molybdenum and beryllium, with a theoretical maximum reflectivity of 80% for wavelengths around 11 nanometers.
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So the choice seemed obvious, right?
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I mean, pick the shorter wavelength and the higher reflectivity.
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But it turns out that beryllium is extremely toxic and it's also difficult to handle.
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So scientists focused on silicon and molybdenum instead.
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To make the mirrors, Zeiss used a process called sputtering.
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A target of coating material is bombarded with either plasma or ions, causing atoms to be ejected, fly off, and stick to the mirror.
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This is a messy process, so the layers end up having bumps and gaps.
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That was a nice trick that actually the team in the Netherlands perfected.
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With iron beam, you just shake it a little bit until the atom falls in the hole where it needs to be, and then it's all flat.
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With the mirror design locked in, ASML needed a source for that specific wavelength.
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So it was 13.x.
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Yeah.
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The next good question is, what's the x?
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Now you look for the source.
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So there are basically three ways to generate the UV, to build a sun on Earth.
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The first method, which early researchers used, was the synchrotron.
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But it was quickly rolled out because each machine needed its own source.
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The other two methods are based on the same principle.
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When an electron recombines with an ion, the ion drops to a lower energy level, and it releases that excess energy as a photon.
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And if you choose the ion just right, then that photon will have exactly the wavelength you need.
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Now, there are two ways you can create those ions.
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The first is you take a metal, heat it up until you get a metal vapor, and then you apply a strong electric field across it.
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This causes three electrons to knock into nearby atoms and ionize them.
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If you then turn off the electric field, the electrons recombine with the ions and produce light.
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This is discharge-produced plasma.
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That's the concept we used first because of its relative simplicity.
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And we quickly got it to a few watts.
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We wanted to get 100 watts and we struggled forever.
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So you couldn't scale it?
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We could not scale it.
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They needed a drastic change.
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So they switched to the second method.
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This method uses a high-powered laser to hit a target material, creating a plasma that's more than 220,000 degrees Celsius hot.
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The electrons have so much energy that the nucleus can't hold on to them anymore.
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And up to 14 electrons escape their orbits.
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After the laser shuts off, the electrons and ions recombine to produce light.
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This is laser-produced plasma, and it was the only method that seemed scalable.
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In fact, this was the same method that the engineering test stand used.
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A 1700-watt laser fired into a stream of xenon gas to produce 13.4 nanometer light.
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But Xenon had a big problem.
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The conversion efficiency, that is the ratio of usable light to the amount of power you put in, was terrible.
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It was only around 0.5%.
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That's because while Xenon does emit light in the 13 to 14 nanometer range, there's much more light released around 11 nanometers.
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So most of the energy went into making light that the mirrors couldn't reflect.
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Plus, the laser didn't ionize all the atoms, so leftover neutral Xenon atoms would strongly reabsorb some of that 13.4 nanometer light.
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So, ASML started looking at another material, tin.
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Now, tin has a much higher emission peak, around 13.5 nanometers, which results in a 5 to 10 times higher conversion efficiency than Xenon.
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But just like Xenon, neutral tin atoms also absorb EUV light.
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So they came up with a crazy idea to shoot one tiny tin droplet at a time.
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But to get the required power, you would have to make and hit thousands of droplets every second, all of which have to be the exact same shape and size.
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But it turns out that you can't instantly make thousands of tin droplets that are the exact same.
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So they found a workaround.
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To make the droplets, extremely pure tin is melted and pushed through a microscopic nozzle by high-pressure nitrogen.
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This nozzle vibrates at a high frequency, breaking the stream into tiny droplets.
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These droplets are irregular in size, shape, velocity and distance, and the whole process is chaotic.
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That's like our magic sauce, is how do you modulate that tin jet so it forms the droplets we want and that they're stable.
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I think we found some paper that described this process, and it was sort of eye-opening to me
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that it seems like all the droplets actually come out irregular out of the nozzle.
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But then before they reach the site where they get hit by the laser, like the little irregular droplets come together to form these perfectly spaced,
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perfectly regular droplets that are about the same size and shape, and all traveling at the same velocity.
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That feels like magic to me, Jason.
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Yeah, it's exactly that.
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It's how do you take a long stream of a tin jet
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that wants to break up into all these irregular droplets
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and like force onto it that it's going to collapse into a single droplet and then happen again and again and again.
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You also don't have that many variables to play with.
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You've got the pressure with which you push out the tin and the frequency of the nozzle.
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Yeah, it seems like a hard problem to solve.
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There's not a whole lot of variables to play with and
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so mastering that modulation of the jet is how we make the droplets.
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But these droplets not only have to be identical, they have to be moving incredibly fast.
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What will happen is if the next droplet that's coming down the line is too close, then it'll actually get disturbed and mess up the next plasma event.
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So we have a requirement which is both that we make 50,000 droplets per second, but also that they're traveling extremely fast.
382
By 2011, their laser produced plasma source reached 11 watts, which was more than double what they managed with their previous source.
383
But they were still limited to just 5 wavers per hour.
384
So they needed to increase the power and fast, because they promised they'd hit 60 wavers per hour by the end of 2011.
385
Unfortunately, this new method had a major flaw.
386
Now the problem with the tin issue, you hit the droplet, you generate EUV with a very decent conversion efficiency, where does the tin go?
387
Because like you know 30 centimeters away you have this atomically flat, very beautiful, very expensive mirror from our friends at Zeiss.
388
And in the early days we would coat the thing within like this.
389
These machines need to run for a year.
390
You're putting liters of tin through this plasma event and a single nanometer of tin, if it was to land on that collector mirror,
391
you'd You have to take the collector out of commission.
392
We need to keep it almost perfectly clean for a year.
393
Yeah, how do you even approach that?
394
So our main tool here is the hydrogen gas, actually.
395
They filled the chamber with low pressure hydrogen.
396
This slows and cools the tin particles down.
397
And even if something makes it to the collector, the hydrogen pulls it off to form a gas called stannane.
398
This way, the machine cleans the collectors while it's running.
399
But that hydrogen gas also gets hot from all those tin explosions.
400
So they need to keep flushing new, cooler hydrogen into the system while flushing out the stinane and hotter gas.
401
But they had to get the pressure and the flow rate just right.
402
I mean, too little hydrogen and the mirrors would get too dirty, but too much hydrogen would not only absorb too much EUV light, but it would also cause the system to overheat.
403
But the question is, how much heat is there?
404
How much energy is being deposited into the gas? and we were stumped for quite some time.
405
If you look at an EEV light source, what you'll see is that it's kind of like a globe of like purplish red light.
406
And you kind of ask yourself like, why is that happening?
407
So we bought an ultra fast camera.
408
What we realized is that after every plasma event, there's a shockwave that goes propagating out into the hydrogen gas.
409
And it's extremely repeatable.
410
And you think to yourself, there must be like an explanation for this.
411
And there's this formula, the Taylor van Neumann-Ziddow formula, that explains point source explosions in an environment,
412
like say, a nuclear blast out to supernova.
413
So I took this formula, it exactly describes the data.
414
It's just fantastic that we're seeing these tiny little supernovas happening in our vessel 50,000 times a second.
415
And is that a fair way to think about this?
416
Like creating mini supernovae?
417
Yeah, it's actually pretty similar.
418
It's almost like very similar to a Type 1a supernova, it turns out, where you kind of have an object that just fully evaporates and explodes apart.
419
And when all that energy goes into the hydrogen gas, it produces a shockwave, a blast wave that comes flying out, which is basically the same thing if you look up in the night sky.
420
There are these like remnant supernovas that you can see coming from space.
421
Using those energy calculations, they discovered they needed to flush the hydrogen at incredibly high speeds, around 360 kilometers per hour.
422
That's more than a category 5 hurricane, even if those speeds are at low density.
423
But 2012 came and went, and they still didn't have enough power.
424
In fact, by 2013, ASML just reached 50 watts by shooting 50,000 thin droplets per second.
425
But this increased power came at a price, because more power means more heat.
426
Heat that ends up slightly shifting the mirrors, resulting in misaligned light and misaligned chip layers.
427
So SAIS built a nervous system directly into the optics.
428
Robot guided sensors that constantly measure the exact position and angle of each mirror,
429
down to the nanometer and the picoradiant, which is absolutely insane.
430
So how accurate do we need to control this mirror?
431
Now one of the things you can do a thought experiment and I can place a little laser
432
on the side of this mirror.
433
And we go all the way to the moon and we put a dime here.
434
So then this light travels all the way here and then with the accuracy I can control this mirror.
435
I can decide whether I point to this side of the dime or whether I point to this side of the dime.
436
What?
437
That's crazy.
438
So you can see that the pointing accuracy is also in picoradiance.
439
That is something very extreme.
440
This allowed them to control the light even when the power increased.
441
While Zeiss was doing a stellar job with the optics, ASML was still struggling with the power source.
442
The problem was that the thin droplets were too dense, meaning
443
that most of the emitted EUV light was still getting reabsorbed
444
by the neutral atoms before it could ever reach the collector mirror.
445
The way we blasted the droplet was so not enough light, too much debris.
446
To make matters worse, they could see that about 10 years from now, they would need a new generation of machine.
447
A high NA EUV machine.
448
Essentially one with a larger optics system that could print smaller features.
449
So what did they do?
450
They decided to double down and invest in the next generation before they even got the current one to work.
451
The most doubtful period was in the beginning.
452
So I started to work on this in 2012.
453
By that time, EUV was not working.
454
And there was this crazy idiot working on the next generation
455
where we could not even make the EUV light in the first place.
456
Not only are you all in on EUV, you're doubling down even before you know if EUV is going to work.
457
Yes.
458
But to keep funding the development, they needed money and lots of it.
459
So they turned to the very people who needed this technology.
460
ASML reached out to its main customers, okay, you want this technology for the next generation of chips,
461
well you need to make us able to invest more by investing in us.
462
Intel invested around 4.1 billion dollars and Samsung and TSMC invested another 1.3 billion combined.
463
So they can keep the research going, but with no product to show, customers were running out of patience.
464
We were crucified at every conference.
465
That promises we made last year we were unable to live up to.
466
And they said this is what you showed two years ago, this is what you showed last year, this is what you're telling me this year, so why would I believe you?
467
They were getting desperate.
468
But this was I think about 2012 or 2013.
469
We were struggling to get the EV power up.
470
And Kinoshita visited us, I took him to dinner in a small town nearby
471
and across from the The restaurant was a Maria Chapel.
472
And now, you know, science, we have come to the limits of science.
473
Let's go for defined interventions.
474
So we went to the chapel.
475
So Kinoshita, just to be safe, lit three candles for the three suppliers that were pursuing EV technology at the time.
476
And lo and behold, and I have the data to prove it, there is a very strong correlation between us lighting the candle and power going up.
477
It's not a causal effect, but there is a strong correlation.
478
The big idea was instead of hitting the droplet once, hit it twice.
479
One shot to hit the droplet and it expands in like a pancake shape.
480
And then, only then, have the second shot, the more powerful main pulse, where you evaporate the pancake and turn it into a plasma.
481
This was a major breakthrough.
482
By changing the target from a droplet to a pancake, you got a larger surface area for the laser to vaporize but without the cost of adding more debris or neutral atoms.
483
Because now the tin is vaporized all at once.
484
By 2014, they finally managed to hit that coveted 100 watts mark.
485
But improvements in multi-patterning with 193 nanometers now meant
486
that EUV would only be useful if the source reached at least 200 watts and made 125 wavers per hour.
487
The source went from 100 to 200, but as the industry moved on, nobody waits for you.
488
They find other solutions.
489
We had to catch up, so it was a moving goalpost.
490
One of the problems was how do you perfectly time the laser so you hit each of these droplets?
491
So the analogy is a bit like a golf ball that you need to land in the hole 200 meters away.
492
Not like land on the green, not bounce and then get in the hole, but like land in the hole every time.
493
That's the level of precision that we need to deliver the droplets.
494
Those droplets are traveling through this maelstrom of hydrogen flow.
495
The speeds are tremendously high, it's like shoot golf balls through a tornado.
496
And then right when it lands at the hole, that's when it needs to get hit by the laser.
497
So in order to basically track the droplets, for that we use laser curtains and we can sort of look at when does the droplet pass through a laser curtain.
498
Those scattered photons tell us basically when and where is the droplet.
499
And then importantly tells us when to fire the laser.
500
So we actually have to take into account how long will
501
it take for the light pulse to hit the droplet after we send the pulse.
502
Now by 2015 they were getting closer and closer to that coveted 200 watt mark.
503
When all of a sudden the ASML board members got summoned.
504
This was one of these decisive moments where our customers were really thin on patience
505
and Martin and other board members were summoned to Korea to show 200 watt.
506
They were really fed up with it.
507
You either show it now or you go away.
508
When they entered the plane, the experiment was still running.
509
When they exited the plane, they had the first result demonstrating to the other.
510
This is how close we came.
511
With the source power up, there was one final problem that had to be solved before they could begin manufacturing their machine.
512
See, while the hydrogen gas did protect the collector mirror from debris, it wasn't perfect.
513
All the intense high-energy photons and hydrogen ions zipping around deteriorated a very special top coating on the collector.
514
So they still had to clean the mirrors every 10 hours, which is terrible for productivity.
515
Martin van den Brink asked for updates every day on their progress.
516
But then one of the engineers noticed that every time they opened up the machine, the mirrors suddenly seemed cleaner.
517
He kind of chimed in and said, oh, wait a second.
518
Whenever we open up the machine, oxygen comes in and our problem is solved.
519
Couldn't we think of a way to add just a little oxygen to our system
520
and make sure that the collector stays clean longer?
521
And so they started experimenting with the amount of oxygen that was needed in the vacuum.
522
And then finally got to this point, okay, if we add so much oxygen, we'll keep the collector clean for longer.
523
With this fix, ASML's machine could run continuously for much longer.
524
And it finally became commercially viable.
525
By 2016, orders started pouring in, and now all of the most advanced chips need ASML's machine,
526
making them perhaps the most important tech company in the world.
527
ASML's first commercial machines had a numerical aperture of 0.33 and could print 13nm lines.
528
These are called the Loename machines, and ASML still makes them.
529
But the machine that Jan's team started working on back in 2012 was the next generation, which had a larger optic system so they could print even smaller features.
530
This is the Hi-NA machine with a numerical aperture of 0.55, and we get to see their latest version up close.
531
How much is the machine?
532
Eh, we always say north of 350 million euros.
533
And you can actually buy it, right?
534
You can if you want, yeah.
535
If I had the money, I could buy it.
536
Yes, you could.
537
How many people have seen this before?
538
We really limit the amount of people that get to go inside the clean room.
539
ASML's machines are built in a super strict clean room.
540
In any cubic meter, there can be no more than 10 particles, only 0.1 microns large.
541
And nothing bigger than that.
542
A speck of pollen is around 20 microns, and extremely fine sand is around 10 microns.
543
To put all of this in perspective, hospital operating rooms, which have to be extremely clean,
544
only allow a maximum of 10,000 particles per cubic meter that are 0.1 microns wide.
545
It's so unfair how much better Mark looks though.
546
In his light suit, I feel like a little nerve.
547
Okay, so we're gonna go through the air showers.
548
So you're gonna have to do as I do.
549
So this is brushing down all the particles that are still on us.
550
Yeah, so this is like super clean air blowing us clean.
551
This place is huge.
552
It's huge.
553
It's insane.
554
I've been in a clean room a couple times before, but it's nothing compared to this.
555
Are there any secret areas here where almost no one has access to?
556
Uh...
557
I can't tell you.
558
Great answer.
559
Okay, so this is the total system.
560
This is it.
561
That's crazy.
562
Look how big it is.
563
This is the most advanced machine humanity's ever built.
564
It's taken many, many years, decades of development, many billions of dollars, all to get this humongous beauty.
565
So this is the first H&A machine?
566
Yes.
567
So if you saw pictures on the internet or whatever, Yeah.
568
that's this machine.
569
So the very first lines ever printed at 8 nanometers and stuff, that was this machine.
570
The smoothest object on earth?
571
Yeah, it's all in here, yeah.
572
Wait, so let me see if I can figure this out.
573
This is the light source.
574
This is where they make the extreme ultraviolet.
575
Yes.
576
And then the laser must come in from there.
577
In fact, we got to see just how the laser and light source work.
578
I think we're entering the laser system here.
579
Mark's just making sure I think that we can actually film here.
580
We're not catching anything we're not supposed to.
581
Oh, wow.
582
This looks dangerous.
583
Now, the laser system is covered by all of these brown cabinets, but here is a model version.
584
A carbon dioxide laser of just a few watts enters this amplifier, it bounces around until it's roughly five times its original power.
585
It then goes through a total of four different amplifiers to bring the final laser up to 20 000 watts, which is four times stronger than lasers that cut through steel.
586
Over here we have the amplifiers that generate this powerful laser beam.
587
And then it basically comes out and this is part of the beam transport system where it's brought to the machine.
588
So this pipe here has the big laser beam.
589
And this has a mirror?
590
Yes.
591
Then the pulses travel to the light source module.
592
It kind of looks like a transformer or like a...
593
I don't know, like a spaceship.
594
There's so many wires going everywhere.
595
Don't twitch this.
596
Holy crap.
597
This is pretty big, huh?
598
This is insane.
599
And this is just a light source.
600
This is just a light source.
601
Are you getting this comparison, Sean?
602
So you need all of this just to make the UV light.
603
Just to make the light?
604
Yes.
605
That's incredible.
606
Can we do a little walk around?
607
You can do a little walk.
608
Let's go.
609
So basically this is the heart of the source.
610
Can I stand on here?
611
If you're below 137 you can.
612
I think I am.
613
And so the tin droplets are coming in from the left.
614
Yes.
615
Then we're shooting a laser from here?
616
Yeah.
617
Okay, it explodes.
618
And then the light goes out there.
619
One improvement from ASML's first EUV machine to their newest one is the number of pulses that hit the droplet.
620
The first prepulse still flattened the droplet into a pancake.
621
But now there's also a second prepulse that further reduces the density.
622
It basically turns it into a low-density gas.
623
It verifies it.
624
And then the final pulse essentially ionizes all of it.
625
So for basically the same power coming from the drive laser, they get even more EUV light.
626
Now, if they want even more light, then the only way to do that is by hitting more droplets.
627
And that's exactly what they did.
628
Our most recent EUV light sources that we're shipping right now, which are around the 500 watt level, we increased the rep rate up to 60,000 times per second.
629
And then we have a roadmap that's going to go to 100,000 droplets per second.
630
We've actually now already demonstrated this 100,000 droplets per second in the lab, so it's not an if, but a win.
631
Crazy.
632
The three pulses that we use to make the pancake, to blow up the pancake a little bit, and then to evaporate the pancake.
633
Yeah.
634
The first two pulses, they would be coming in through this pipe here.
635
And then the main pulse with the big laser, the laser beam would be delivered through this pipe here.
636
Both the high and low NA machines shipping out right now use three pulses, and eventually they will hit more droplets per second.
637
But the light source is just one small part of the full machine.
638
After bouncing off the collector mirror, the EUV light moves to the illuminator.
639
A set of mirrors shape and focus the light before it hits the reticle.
640
The reticle is the top half, and this module is built in a separate facility and installed later.
641
Next, the light goes into the projection optics box, which is a set of mirrors that shrink the light down.
642
The Hyenae machine can shrink the pattern eight times in the vertical direction and four times in the horizontal direction.
643
The mirrors are also much smoother still.
644
If the low NA's mirrors were the size of Germany, the tallest bump would be about a millimeter.
645
But if the high NA mirrors were the size of the world, the tallest bump would be about the thickness of a playing card.
646
By the combination of both of these improvements, ASML was able to increase the numerical aperture from 0.33 to 0.55.
647
And finally, the light hits the waver.
648
In order to print around 185 wavers per hour, the reticle whips back and forth at accelerations of over 20 Gs.
649
That's over five times the acceleration of a Formula One car.
650
And this is some actual footage of what that's like inside this machine, and notice that this is not sped up.
651
But the crazy thing to me about this machine isn't how fast the reticle moves, or even how small it can print, but it's just how insanely accurate it needs to be.
652
The most any two layers can be off, which is called the overlay, is one nanometer.
653
That's five freaking silicon atoms of precision.
654
That's insane.
655
So typically what we do as system engineers is that we make a budget.
656
So we say, hey, you get, let's say, a nanometer.
657
And we divide then the nanometers to smaller fractions.
658
The nanometers total.
659
It's not like your group gets a nanometer.
660
You get a nanometer.
661
You get no. No, you get a nanometer in total.
662
Yes.
663
So you have to fight for your part of the nanometer.
664
It's kind of cool to realize that every smartphone nowadays has a chip
665
that is made with the machine that was actually put together here.
666
So that's a cool thought.
667
Take a look at this.
668
It's pretty massive, huh? So big.
669
So do you cover it up?
670
Yes.
671
At a customer fat, it will be looking like a big white box.
672
I like it better like this.
673
Yeah, me too.
674
It's funny, you need such a big machine, so much infrastructure to make the tiniest things we can make at scale.
675
It's inversely proportional.
676
Yeah, the smaller you want to go, the larger everything around it becomes.
677
After the machines are assembled, tested and approved, they are disassembled to ship all around the world.
678
5,000 companies supply 100,000 parts, 3,000 cables, 40,000 bolts and two kilometers of hosing.
679
ASML ships their H&A machine in 250 containers, spread out over 25 trucks and seven Boeing 747s.
680
Despite all the doubt and setback, EUV finally made it to manufacturing level three decades after Kinoshita's first images.
681
But even when almost the entire world didn't believe it would work, there were some people at ASML who knew that it was going to work all the way back in 2010.
682
Around 2001 we said let's do EUV.
683
And then we run into many challenges.
684
2010 we installed the first system at a customer.
685
So it was installed in Korea.
686
There it was.
687
This thing I had been pursuing for 13 years was now standing at a customer producing wafers.
688
This for me was a moment I realized, yes, we made the right bet.
689
Years later, Jas ran into the man who helped install that first machine.
690
He's now a professor at the Renown Institute.
691
And I shared the story about my relief and how great we made the decision.
692
And Hanko said, yeah, yeah, yeah.
693
He said, when you left, when you flew out after Christmas, the thing broke down.
694
And it took two months to get back up again.
695
And they almost fired me for making the wrong decision.
696
We had some ups and downs along the way.
697
But again, once I saw the system installed at a customer, in a customer fab, I knew we had done the right thing.
698
This was 2010, the first phone that came out was 2019, so we still had some hurdles to resolve, but we kept going.
699
Now, I have spent several months working on this video and thinking about it, and it still feels absolutely impossible.
700
And the more I think about it, the more I think, you know, those people 40 years ago that said it was impossible, they had a point.
701
But it's completely unreasonable to think that you could make this artificial sun in a lab, that you could make these mirrors that are this smooth,
702
and that you could get the required overlay accuracy.
703
The reasonable thing is to think that none of that is possible
704
and to point out all the problems with each of them.
705
Which reminds me of this quote, the reasonable man adapts himself to the world.
706
The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
707
Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
708
Imagine if Andy and Kinoshita and all the others had been reasonable.
709
We would have none of this.
710
In fact, imagine what the world would be like if everyone on it was reasonable.
711
It would probably be extremely boring.
712
Probably most of the technology, most of the things you enjoy on a daily basis wouldn't be here.
713
In fact, you probably wouldn't be watching this video.
714
Because just about all the technology we have nowadays would seem completely unreasonable even just 200 years ago.
715
And so I really think that to a large extent we owe our lives to those unreasonable people.
716
And maybe, at least to me, it's a reminder that it's good to be a little unreasonable.
717
At least in some of the big parts of life.
718
Changing the world is difficult.
719
It took overcoming thousands of obstacles and over 30 years to get EUV to work.
720
But big breakthroughs usually start in the same way.
721
That is, you learn, you explore some related ideas, you try to apply them in some new ways, and then you build skills to take on bigger and bigger challenges.
722
Bit by bit, you gain knowledge.
723
And that's where today's video sponsor Brilliant comes in.
724
Brilliant helps you excel in math, science, and computer science with visual interactive learning that's personalized for you.
725
It's an incredibly powerful way to reach big learning goals.
726
Mastering math for class or contributing to the next big technological breakthrough.
727
On Brilliant, you learn by doing, a method that research has shown to be far more effective than just passive learning.
728
It starts you at the right level based on your background, designs practice sets and reviews customized for you, and then it helps you advance at your ideal pace.
729
There is always something new to discover on Brilliant.
730
Want to better understand optics after watching this video? well, their scientific thinking course is a great place to start.
731
It helps you think like an engineer by showing you how to break down large concepts into smaller, more understandable pieces.
732
Whether you're conquering fundamental math, algebra, or calculus, diving deep into algorithms,
733
exploring material science, or understanding the physics that will take us beyond EUV, Brilliant will help you get there.
734
And if, like me, you've resolved to learn more in the new year, then Brilliant is a great way to actually make that resolution stick.
735
So to learn for free, go to brilliant.org slash Veritasium, scan the QR code on screen, or click the link in the description.
736
Brilliant's also given our viewers 20% off an annual premium subscription, which gives you unlimited daily access to everything on Brilliant.
737
So I want to thank Brilliant for sponsoring this video, and I want to thank you for watching.
738
Thank you.
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Exploring the Wonders of Microchip Technology: A Language Learning Journey
The video takes us on a fascinating tour of microchip creation, blending cutting-edge science with everyday language. As we dive into how transistors power our devices and the "impossible machine" that saved Moore's Law, we also uncover opportunities to boost our English skills—perfect for IELTS speaking practice or refining pronunciation.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
- "whizzing electrons": Describes fast movement—great for talking about technology or busy scenes.
- "screeching halt": Expresses sudden stop, useful in stories or explaining delays.
- "roughly the size of": Compares objects simply, key for clear descriptions.
- "overlay perfectly": Talks about precise alignment, handy for DIY or tech tasks.
- "extending its structure": Explains growth or expansion, ideal for science or business contexts.
Step-by-Step Shadowing Guide: Master the Dialogue
The video’s mix of casual questions ("Can I touch it?") and technical terms makes it a great shadowing technique challenge. Here’s how to practice:
- Listen and repeat short chunks: Pause after phrases like "the number you could fit on a chip doubled every two years" and mimic the rhythm. Focus on stressing "doubled" and "every two years" to match the speaker’s emphasis.
- Copy intonation in questions: Notice how "How often do you miss a laser shot?" rises at the end. Repeating this helps with natural English pronunciation in conversations.
- Speed up gradually: The dialogue includes fast-paced lines like "50,000 droplets every single second." Start slow, then match the speed to build fluency—perfect for shadowspeak practice.
- Focus on technical vocabulary: Words like "photoresist" or "ingot" are pronounced clearly. Repeat them to feel confident using specialized terms in discussions.
By engaging with this video, you’ll not only learn about "alien technology" but also sharpen your English skills in a fun, exploratory way. Ready to start shadow speak and see your progress soar?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if you could produce the light, you'd need · If one mirror would be · if we add so much oxygen, we'll keep |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | they've built · you've made · We've simplified |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | are shrunk · is shot · is sponsored |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | chunks, which is · chips, which are · short, which is |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.