This Machine Shoots 50,000 Tin Drops a Second. Why? (EUV)

Only one company on Earth can build the machine behind your phone's chips. Not Nikon. Not Canon. Why? To print a switch smaller than a virus, you need a pen made of light — 13.5 nanometres. Making that light means blasting drops of molten tin into a plasma about forty times hotter than the surface of the Sun, fifty thousand times a second. Steering it means mirrors built from a hundred layers, so smooth that one blown up to the size of Germany would have no bump taller than a tenth of a millimetre. And the whole path has to run in a vacuum, because air eats this light. Why exactly 13.5? Because it is the one place where a light source and a mirror both work at the same time. SOURCES Every number in this video appears on screen. Main references: ASML technical publications and annual reports; ZEISS SMT; TRUMPF; Fomenkov et al., "Light sources for high-volume manufacturing EUV lithography", Advanced Optical Technologies 6 (2017); van de Kerkhof et al. (ASML), SPIE Advanced Lithography 2021; imec; the CXRO/LBNL X-ray optical constants database. IMAGES Chip die photo: "AMD3101E" by Mister rf, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Sound effects by Kenney (CC0). #EUV #Semiconductors #ASML