Queue extreme UV lithography. Where the light source costs $100M, took 8,000 engineers 20 years to develop, and consumes 1MW of power to shine a 1kW beam.
This uses tin plasma generated by laser pulses. No particle accelerators involved.
One could build an EUV source based on a free electron laser too, which involves a particle accelerator, but I assume that has some limitations that make it less suitable for lithography.
Have you heard of Rayton Solar? They are supposedly slicing nanometer thin silicon with a particle accelerator. I don't know how hard it'd be to extend this to lithography though...
You can use a bank of capacitors and the power itself is not a huge deal (still not trivial, but it's been done for 60+ years).
The problem is also that at 1kW for every 1Mw you still only use 0.1% of the energy you pumped in. And the energy requirements are still large because you are firing this thing repeatedly. Assuming the same amount of energy is required to ablate the atoms as with conventional UV (I'm not in the field, but its probably not a bad assumption), you have to multiply the ratio of the efficiencies of both methods to get at the energy required. Could be several multiples more if not an order of magnitude.
Also where does the remaining 999kW go? Eventually heat, so you have to spend 2Mw more to cool it (assuming 50% AC efficiency, I guess you could pump cold water instead). Add in the energy costs of opening and closing a vacuum lock and this is a fun project to be working on :D
Actually most nodes are phasing out EUV lithography research and moving to plasma-enhanced lithography. Pretty sure you can't really go below 15nm without PECVD/Plasma enhanced etch steps.
They left the semiconductor manufacturing business. That's a different segment. The lithographic tools and the technology used to make those tools are both different market segments that IBM is involved in.
They haven't gotten out of research in the Area at all, their labs are still among the leading ones in many different subareas (the director of the Zurich Lab gave a talk at my University just recently). They also continue to develop both their Power 9 and Mainframe processors.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 58.9 ms ] threadhttps://www.google.ca/amp/spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/d...
Bill Nye the Science Guy is their PR person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA8fKlfcA7E
[1] https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-5nm-chip/
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/cue
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/queue
Same pronunciation, different meaning.
The problem is also that at 1kW for every 1Mw you still only use 0.1% of the energy you pumped in. And the energy requirements are still large because you are firing this thing repeatedly. Assuming the same amount of energy is required to ablate the atoms as with conventional UV (I'm not in the field, but its probably not a bad assumption), you have to multiply the ratio of the efficiencies of both methods to get at the energy required. Could be several multiples more if not an order of magnitude.
Also where does the remaining 999kW go? Eventually heat, so you have to spend 2Mw more to cool it (assuming 50% AC efficiency, I guess you could pump cold water instead). Add in the energy costs of opening and closing a vacuum lock and this is a fun project to be working on :D
I thought they got out of the chip business.
http://exposingpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2015/07/ibm-and-holoc...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
IBM appears to be forgetting, or be actively suppressing, this lesson.
https://www.adl.org/news/op-ed/on-holocaust-remembrance-day-...