This is how your devices are getting smaller and faster

[exile360]

In the words of Danny Brown, VP of Technology Development at ASML: Silicon lithography is the ultimate alchemy; turning sand into gold.  Right now tech companies that make the chips that power our devices, including the likes of Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, TSMC and Samsung, are ramping up production on the next generation of microprocessors that will power the technology we have come to enjoy and rely on.  These devices have always gotten faster, smaller, more power efficient, and greatly more complex at a reliable pace known as Moore's law, roughly doubling in transistor density every two years.  The laws of physics, however, do not recognize the legitimacy of Moore's law (since of course, it is actually an observation, not a natural law) and shrinking the features of these chips into smaller and higher resolution packages has become a major challenge.  The size of an individual transistor has grown so small, that projecting its image onto the silicon wafers that make up those chips can no longer be accomplished using current lasers.  This is where Extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV comes in.  Developing this new projection method required the creation of machines so large that they dwarf the size of many buildings, requiring 40 freight containers to ship them to chip makers like Intel and TSMC (the latter being the producer of most of AMD and NVIDIA's chips for their CPUs and graphics cards).  ASML, the company that makes the machines that make the chips that power our technology, gives us an inside look at this exciting new technology in this brief 11 minute video that details what this new tech is and why it is so significant:

 

[inspiredwoman]

Physicists and engineers are absolutely amazing people! Sometimes, I forget that we're in the future.