We now know what Pat Gelsinger’s project is after leaving Intel: particle accelerators for making chips.

Very roughly speaking, this light source generates EUV radiation using high-power lasers capable of instantly heating tens of thousands of tiny tin droplets in a single second to temperatures of half a million degrees Celsius. This interaction produces an extremely hot plasma that emits ultraviolet light with a wavelength of 13.5 nm. It seems like a relatively simple strategy, but it is anything but. In fact, the EUV source is one of ASML’s disruptive components.

Pat Gelsinger has joined the xLight team.
Interestingly, to manufacture cutting-edge semiconductors using sub-7 nm integration technology, it is not essential to use an ultraviolet light source like the one I just described. Other approaches are also possible. The prototype EUV lithography machine that, according to leaks, Huawei is testing in its laboratory in Dongguan, China, uses an LDP (laser-induced discharge) ultraviolet light source, not the LPP (laser-generated plasma) type used by ASML.

Another option requires using a synchrotron particle accelerator to generate ultraviolet radiation. This is the approach the Chinese Academy of Sciences is pursuing with the facility it is developing in Beijing, China. Its HEPS (High Energy Photon Source) has been designed to deliver high-power EUV light simultaneously to several integrated circuit manufacturing plants. However, that’s not all. There is at least one other option also being explored for generating EUV light.