#lithography
3 articles
01
·Supply Chain·★ MEMBER·9 min read
Inside the Equipment Makers — What ASML, AMAT, TEL and Lam Actually Build
Chip manufacturing is four actions repeated hundreds of times — deposit, print, etch, clean — and each action has its own machine and its own specialist vendor. After mapping steps to suppliers, two pieces of arithmetic explain why the tool business collapses into a handful of firms, and why ASML's EUV monopoly is really a bundle of irreplaceable component makers.
02
·Fabrication & Packaging·★ MEMBER·10 min read
EUV Lithography — The Madness of Making 13.5nm Light
Light at 13.5nm is absorbed by air and by every lens material there is. So why did the semiconductor industry build an entire industry around it? Tin plasma sources, optics with no lenses at all, and the cost arithmetic against multi-patterning — explained from zero.
03
·Fabrication & Packaging·★ MEMBER·9 min read
How Chips Are Made — From Wafer to Yield
Every GPU and phone processor starts as sand and passes through hundreds of printing steps. From the basic moves — lithography, etching, ion implantation — to the brute force of EUV and the yield math that makes big dies exponentially expensive, explained from zero.