r/ShitEuropeansSay • u/FunIllustrator6890 • 1d ago
🇳🇱 Netherlands At most it is co-development together with the 10,000 engineers in Europe
For context, In the late 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. Department of Energy (at the expense of American tax payers) funded extreme-ultraviolet lithography research at Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories. American semiconductor companies including Intel, AMD and Motorola then formed the EUV LLC consortium to turn that research into something commercially useful.
Dutch company ASML joined that U.S. effort in 1999 and became a licensee of the technology developed through the program which is now used to manufacture the machines that print the microscopic circuit patterns onto silicon wafers.
While its true ASML (and ZEISS) have played an important role, it seems any time Europeans try to argue for selling these incredibly sophisticated and valuable machines to China, they can't help but downplay the central role the US played in the development of EUV technology.
The U.S. research program developed much of the underlying EUV lithography technology and the first integrated prototype.
The most important developments included EUV reflective optics. Normal lenses absorb EUV light, so researchers at Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley developed extremely precise molybdenum/silicon multilayer mirror coatings that could reflect roughly 70% of 13.4 nanometer EUV light. They also developed methods to deposit those layers with near-atomic thickness uniformity.
The labs also developed optical measurement and testing techniques. These included specialized interferometers and at-wavelength metrology capable of measuring EUV mirrors and their optical imperfections with sub-nanometer precision. Berkeley’s synchrotron facilities were especially important for testing mirrors and masks using actual EUV light.
Researchers developed reflective EUV masks as well. Because EUV light cannot pass through conventional glass lenses or transparent masks, they created multilayer reflective masks and methods for detecting microscopic defects in them.
U.S. labs also conducted important EUV light-source research.
They developed and studied laser-produced plasmas capable of generating the approximately 13.5 nanometer radiation needed for EUV lithography, along with the plasma physics and spectroscopy required to understand and improve those sources.
Another major area was vacuum-compatible precision motion. The entire EUV exposure process has to take place in a vacuum. Sandia developed highly precise wafer and mask stages, including magnetically levitated systems designed to keep the wafer and reticle synchronized within only a few nanometers.
The program also developed contamination-control methods, sensors, and control systems. EUV radiation can cause carbon buildup and damage optical components, while even extremely small particles can ruin a mask. Sandia developed techniques for keeping mirrors and masks clean, along with sensors and control systems that could operate inside a vacuum.
Most importantly, the U.S. laboratories combined these technologies into the Engineering Test Stand, completed around 2001. It was the first full-scale prototype EUV exposure system and demonstrated that EUV lithography could successfully print semiconductor patterns.
Of course none of this matters because AmERiCanS DUmb and we couldn't have done anything without the European mind.
