Intel to preserve Moore's Law with startup land's fresh young blood Moore's Law ain't dead yet, but Intel needs startups to keep it alive. For several years, observers have noted that straight line predicting the doubling of transistors per chip has slowly bent downwards. It hasn’t helped that Intel itself found it hard to shift from 14nm to 10nm production – recently announcing that it will …
In Germany in 2015
At first I'd thought they were talking about a mini synchrotron (first done by IBM in the early 80's) but their approach seems to be much more efficient at converting input power into X-rays using (relatively) well understood technology (highish power electron currents and ps IR laser pulses) to make X-rays through "Inverse Compton scattering."
Naturally there are a) High hurdles to making this work with a compact syncrotron) b) They say they have solutions for them.
That said we are apparently talking 3 orders of magnitude more power than alternatives, which I'd guess knocks exposure time from hours to seconds. Critical if you want to put this in a production environment.
It looks like someone has finally built a viable high power X-ray laser.
BTW One of things people don't often realize about laser fusion is that all that laser energy is to turn the metal capsule into (in effect) X-ray emitters to cook the deuterium/tritium fuel pellet.
Obviously if you can skip all that malarky and get straight down to just zapping the pellet directly with a lot of X-rays your efficiency goes up quite a lot.
Handy, given the eyewatering some the USG spent on their last laser fusion system.
Another is Lyncean Technologies, based in California, which believes it has cracked the long-awaited "extreme UV" (EUV) process that could theoretically reduce chips down to 2nm –
Err.... I have just been working with ASML in the Netherlands. They have production EUV systems which are shipping now. How are these Lyncean systems different?
http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2017/11/asml_euv_lithography_intel_hil.html
@HPCJohn,
It seems there is some confusion stemming from the wording in the article, Lyncean is only proposing they can build an EUV source based on their compact synchrotron X-ray source (Of which they seem to have built only 1 research example) not an entire EUV scanner. If they can pull this off they could replace the Cymer Laser Produced Plasma source with this new source. Since the Cymer source is a contamination concern due to the amount of "free-flying" tin this would indeed be a step forward, through from what I've heard ASML/Cymer is well on it's way to building a 1kW continuous output LPP source. 250 W has already been produced and several customers seem to be gearing up for high-volume manufacture if their recent press releases are to be believed.
I'll believe it when I see it, having a source is one thing (like Gigaphotons EUV source), being able to deliver the correct (and very tight) dose control at exactly the right focus onto the optics system of the litho scanner is entirely a different matter.
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The reason I developed cataracts in my mid-thirties is I was exposed to a shitload of X-Rays from high power electronics while I wore the uniform. They estimated it was ten times the lifetime dose for an X-Ray technician. Good thing that I never got married and wanting kids. Lord knows what they would have looked like!
Intel is the kiss of death for embedded anything. If it doesn't instantly take over the entire market (like nothing by anyone ever has) it gets canned. Long ago all responsible engineers learned to never use anything Intel in embedded designs for this reason...
Edison
Gallileo
Arduino 101
In just the past few years. 100% failure rate on all embedded dev setups associated with Intel in any way.
Crap. I liked the ESPs. So long, Expressif.
Intel didn't buy Espressif, they only invested in the company (probably in hopes of being able to learn something or steal something from them later). I wouldn't worry too much about development of the ESPs, the company seems to know enough about what it's doing to actually do something useful with the money.
(Also, it would have been good of El Reg to link to the Espressif press release on the matter)
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