As ASML reaches a ~€275B market cap, twice that of Intel, a look at the fundamental limits on making ever-smaller chips, which could finally end Moore's Law
For decades, ever-tinier semiconductors have allowed huge leaps in computing progress. Not for much longer, warn experts Bluesky: @revan.bsky.social . Tweets: @jasoncosta , @adam_tooze , @graphcoreai , @alexcampolo , @1br0wn , @newlefteviews , @pstasiatech , and @martijnrasser Bluesky: @revan.bsky.social : Another factor that people aren't considering often: electrical charge can only be discrete amounts. I think they bought some time when they moved to vertical 3D NAND, but the last generation of planar NAND were storing only a few electrons in the floating gate to change states. Tweets: Jason Costa / @jasoncosta : ASML story is amazing, and the Intel one has gotten sad. Hope the latter can turn it around. “.” https://www.ft.com/... Adam Tooze / @adam_tooze : “From its headquarters in Veldhoven, just a few kilometres away from that portacabin, ASML produces machines capable of vaporising tiny droplets of molten tin up to 50,000 times a second, creating a 13.5nm wavelength of light.” https://www.ft.com/... [image] @graphcoreai : What's the measure of progress for semiconductors post-Moore's Law? Graphcore's Nigel Toon and the boss of plucky upstart nvidia discuss the future in the FT (paywall). https://www.ft.com/... Alex Campolo / @alexcampolo : Spinoza ground lenses so ASML could vaporise... https://twitter.com/... Ian Brown / @1br0wn : “This idea of the singularity [when AI overtakes human intelligence] is bollocks, but the idea that you can use AI to create a next frontier of computing is perfectly practical.”-Nigel Toon, CEO @graphcoreai https://www.ft.com/... @newlefteviews : This is sort of why TSMC doesn't make Taiwan uniquely indispensable, since they will only be able to do EUV with ASML's lithography machines, which (and the article omits this) are only possible with Zeiss optics and Trumpf lasers. https://www.ft.com/... Paul Triolo / @pstasiatech : ASML has just five customers for its existing EUV machines — TSMC in Taiwan, Samsung and SK Hynix in South Korea, and Intel and Micron in the US. All of them have ordered the latest model... https://www.ft.com/... Martijn Rasser / @martijnrasser : ASML: “working on the first prototype of...newest product: the latest generation of EUV machines that will be used to “print” transistors almost as small as the diameter of a human chromosome on to sheets of silicon to make a semiconductor.” https://www.ft.com/...