Altijd gelijk schreef op 26 september 2024 11:16:
25 Sept
Jane Wordier (Wankers)
EUV: sinking piles of cash in the hopes to push Moore's law forward.
EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) technology, heralded as the future of semiconductor manufacturing, is often presented as a revolution that enables chipmakers to push Moore’s Law forward by shrinking transistors and packing more power into smaller spaces. However, behind the sleek marketing and optimistic projections lies a complex web of challenges that question its viability and long-term sustainability.
First and foremost, EUV lithography is astronomically expensive. ASML, the sole manufacturer of EUV machines, charges hundreds of millions of dollars per machine. The extreme cost of acquiring, maintaining, and operating these machines creates an enormous financial burden on semiconductor companies, limiting access primarily to industry giants with deep pockets. Smaller players are effectively shut out, exacerbating the already vast economic disparities within the tech world. The dependency on a single supplier also introduces a critical bottleneck in the global supply chain, making the entire industry vulnerable to geopolitical tensions, technical failures, or supply disruptions at ASML.
Furthermore, the complexity of EUV lithography makes it a highly unstable technology. Unlike older lithographic techniques, EUV relies on light at a wavelength of just 13.5 nanometers, an incredibly narrow band that presents a multitude of technical challenges. The high-energy photons used in EUV generate enormous amounts of heat, which can cause damage to both the machines and the wafers being processed. Maintaining stable conditions for such an advanced process is extraordinarily difficult, often leading to low yield rates, where a significant portion of the chips produced are defective. This not only drives up costs but also undermines the reliability and scalability of the technology.
Beyond the technical hurdles, EUV technology is deeply unsustainable from an environmental perspective. The machines consume vast amounts of energy, dwarfing the power requirements of previous-generation lithographic techniques. In an era when the tech industry is under growing scrutiny for its carbon footprint, the environmental costs of EUV cannot be ignored. The enormous energy consumption, coupled with the production of waste heat, makes EUV a highly resource-intensive process, raising critical questions about its environmental impact as it scales up in production.
Moreover, despite years of research and development, EUV is still plagued by fundamental limitations that threaten to curtail its long-term potential. The technology is incredibly delicate, requiring hyper-clean environments and precise calibration, which makes it difficult to ramp up production at the levels needed to meet growing global demand for semiconductors. This fragile process leaves little room for error, meaning any unexpected deviation could result in catastrophic production delays or yield losses. In a world that increasingly relies on fast, consistent chip production for everything from smartphones to AI systems, such instability is a ticking time bomb.
Perhaps the most critical issue, however, is the overestimation of EUV’s ability to prolong Moore’s Law. The assumption that EUV will indefinitely allow chipmakers to keep shrinking transistors is a flawed one. Physics itself sets hard limits on how much smaller transistors can get before quantum effects and leakage currents render further miniaturization impractical. As these physical boundaries are approached, the incremental benefits of EUV will diminish, eventually plateauing while the costs continue to rise.
EUV technology, though innovative, comes with a host of economic, technical, environmental, and scalability challenges that could ultimately limit its widespread adoption. Instead of being the panacea it’s marketed as, it may become a costly dead-end, squeezing smaller companies out of the market while delivering diminishing returns for those who can afford to invest in it. The obsession with pushing Moore’s Law through EUV may ultimately lead to a disappointing reckoning for the semiconductor industry, forcing it to confront the hard realities of physics and economics after billions have already been sunk into the technology.