2026-03-04
37 分钟The Economist.
Making computer chips requires machines that are among the most complex available for sale in the world.
These machines use precise lasers to etch patterns onto silicon wafers.
I'm talking about tiny switches called transistors and the minuscule wires that connect them all together.
All of those patterned wafers of silicon are then used for, well, everything.
A Dutch company called ASML specialises in the most cutting edge of those machines.
Known as extreme ultraviolet or EUV,
these machines can etch transistors that are around 10,000 times thinner than a human hair.
That's of a similar size to the diameter of the very smallest of viruses.
The ASML light is produced with this high power laser and they produce a pulse of EUV light 60,000 times per second.
Bruno Lafontaine is a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California.
He previously worked on developing the EUV machines now built by ASML.
How these machines actually work is astonishing.
Inside that vacuum chamber,
there's little droplets of tins that are created and one every 60,000th of a second.
There's a chain of droplets entering at something like 100 meters per second.
Each of these droplets need to be fired on by a laser with extreme precision.
The laser needs to fire three times on the same droplet.
First it flattens the tin, then another pulses makes it a little less dense,
and the third one comes with a much more energy and converts this gas of tin into a hot plasma.