The strange way the world's fastest microchips are made
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show this is planet money from npr.

so there is this technology that when i first heard about that i thought you gotta be kidding me this is gotta be science fiction it's this new way of making microchips there.

is only one company that has figured out this technology a dutch company called a s m l and recently jeff you went their lives in sandy ago how many people have seen what we're.

about to see today well a lot of a s m engineers OK and that's most the list it's a working clean room so it's it's very rare for people to go inside that's sera dcr enzo SHE is a comes person for and she's about to show me the heart of one of their new microchip echo machines.

a microchip is basically a bunch of circuits that are etched onto a piece of silicon the more circuits on the trip the more powerful IT is and for almost the entire history of microchips the circuits have been getting smaller and smaller and the chips have been getting more powerful but about ten years ago that progress slowed pretty dramatically the industry was staring down a dead.

until a s ml made a breakthrough with this new technology these new machines they're able to edge billions and billions circuits onto a single chip but they're also incredibly delicate there says it's been more than a year since they they ve had a journalist inside this lab they don't love to do IT because even the tiny st spec of dust could ruin the machine.

and journalists are not stored.

absolutely up so we have to go through this whole decontamination procedure there is a machine where you stick your foot into to clean your shoes great i untied my shoes that's how powerful IT was next a technician named blame how worth comes over to wipe down my microphone and.

recording equipment and.

yeah this equipment or with the phone blame is pointing to this black phone windscreen that's on my microphone which i will admit was a little dirty IT had some cat hair stuck to IT what do you like about IT.

the particles that gives.

us cle you mean this cat hair.

yeah ah yeah cat hair is a problem for us.

IT really is OK ah i put on what looks like a thin plastic space suit and now i am ready to walk into the clean room about to see one of the most complicated technologies ever invented.

and just at that point you have been talking about this amazing microchips ching technology for like.

but yes because this is the technology behind all the new chips powering the most advanced AI models in the world IT is so important that the us has been lobbing the dutch government not to let a s m l sell any of these machines to china they see that as a matter of national security but most of all i ve just been fascinated by these machines themselves like let me briefly explain how they work right take away you start with a laser a laser that is so powerful IT could cut through a bank fault like butter and then you focus that massive laser on a tiny droplet of multon ton like the metal ton and then billah mo the ten raises into a plasma that gives off a beautiful intense light call IT extreme ultraviolet and the slight bounces off a series of mirrors which have to be like the smoothest mirrors on the planet and IT aces billions and billions of tiny little microscope pic circuits onto a way for of silicon which by the way is magnetically levitating culminating in the most powerful microchips that have ever existed.

i mean i can see why there are a little bit touch about the cat.

hair yes and sale this extreme ultraviolet technology for making ships IT is such an accomplishment IT is like our generations moon landing for years a lot of people thought i was impossible and one of the things i've been obsessed with is how how did we even do IT how did humanity pull this off hello and welcome to planet money i'm.

just go and i'm sorry home IT is easy to take for granted that microchips are just gna get more and more powerful but they don't get powerful all by themselves IT takes a lot of people over a lot of time often they make that that in the moment seem unlikely even foolish.

today on the show how one of the most complicated most improbable technologies in the world this breakthrough and how we make microchips came to be and how would almost didn't.

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In fact, the last year and customers experience a twenty five percent reduction in project duration per year, unleash the potential of your team at at last, in dog com. Every technology starts within a yet. Then in the beginning, that idea is almost like a dream. One of the first people who believed in this revolutionary way of making microchips with andy hover luck.

you're kind of a big deal in the world of mic chips and stuff that's .

for somebody else to decide. I don't I don't consider myself a big deal. I just consider myself one of many .

andy's big idea was that he thought he was possible to edge microchips using extreme ultraViolet light. And this idea actually came to him when he was working on something completely different. IT was the ninety eighties, and he was a Young scientist at the legendary Lawrence livermore national labs in california.

Yet at the dawn of the cold war, the united states had started putting billions of dollars into science and research, and IT created these big national laws.

They roll over the place, and they will have different functions. The primary function for Lawrence live a more is nuclear weapons research. Yeah.

the government scientists said, learns liver more, have designed more than a dozen different types of nuclear warheads. They study nuclear reactions like nuclear fusion.

A fusion reaction generates a lot of powerful light, including extreme ultraViolet anian. His team were working on new kinds of mirrors, mirrors that for the first time could reflect and control the late coming off of a fusion reaction.

And andy realizes that these new special mirrors might have a use outside the lab, because extreme ultraViolet light is super precise. And if we can now control IT with these mirrors, we could edge like the tiny st. Circuits ever and make microchips way more powerful. This is chapter one. In the life of many technologies, someone looks at a scientific breakthrough or a discovery in a lab, and imagine how IT might apply to something totally different, solve some problem in the real world.

and goes to a conference to present this idea. He remembers feeling nervous. All the top mercator researchers are there. Do you remember .

the moment where you went up and presented IT? Was that like.

I remember the moment after I presented .

IT .

was not well received. So many in this sayers got up and basically said, stupid idea, a crazy idea, and I will never happen.

Andy says I was brutal, just everyone piling on him, telling him all the different reasons why his idea wouldn't work. Like these mirrors would have to be the smoothest mirrors on the planet. And was that even possible to generate extreme ultraViolet standing is all just too complicated.

Andy goes back to his lab. His boss asks how his presentation went.

I said, I don't want to talk about IT. I will never speak of this again. Oh my god, I was just, I felt humiliated, embarrassed.

But a few days later, andy gets a phone call from the sky built brickman. He's heard about andy's presentation and wanted to know more, and he's like.

who is this guy? And so I went to my boston and I said, who's bill break, man? And he looked at me and said, he's the executive vice president of eight bell laps. And I went, oh.

bell labs s it's the place where the laser was invented, where fiber optics was invented, is one of the most famous private laboratories in the world. And bill brickman was one of their top scientists.

And I said, well, he just called me in my boss to me and said, he called you that I yeah. And he said, tell me you'll want to explain us.

The folks at bell labs were also looking into ways to etch microchips using extreme multi Violet light. They flew the out to their headquarters in new jersey.

They had to ordure IT with. There were fifty, seventy five people they're to listen to me. IT was a huge reception for, as you know, was that and all the crab.

andy had found a group of follow beevers people who thought maybe this extreme ultraViolet technology really could work. There was also a researcher in japan, hero canossa, who had started tinkering with the idea even before andy. But most of the microchip industry doubted the idea what .

andy and the other beliefs needed to do was to prove that this technology was possible. And to do that, they needed someone to take a gamble. They needed seed money.

This is the start of chapter two in the life of many technologies. And in this case, a lot of that early R N D money would end up coming from the U. S. government.

Yeah, you see, this was the one thousand eighties, and the government was beginning to think differently about its role in R N D. And science. They had been spending billions of dollars on scientific research, which gave me out in the .

cold war a lot of nuclear option stuff.

right? But the cold war was winding down, the brilliant wall was about to crumble.

And congress realized that the national labs, we're sitting on, all this research that could have a lot of practical applications, could stimulate the economy, help make U. S. Companies a lot more competitive.

And so congress told the national labs, we want you to partner up with U. S. companies. We want you to work together to explore commercial uses for your research, and we will give you some seed money to do IT.

IT was perfect timing for our band of beevers. Andy and his team at Lawrence livermore eventually signed a deal with several U. S. Companies to research extreme ultraViolet chip making .

bill brinkman and eighty bill labs. s. Signed a deal too, and IT wasn't just them.

By the early nineteen nineties, a bunch of companies and national nuclear weapons labs. We're working together to see if this technology was viable. One of the people involved was rick stolen. Brick was in charge of the research at senda. National labs was .

there like a quarter back for all of this? Or were you all just working on individual projects trying to chip away at .

the suit problem? Yeah, a great question. We did not have a quoted back.

yeah. Rick said the government seed money had at least all these different teams each working on their own piece of the extreme ultraViolet puzzle.

And bit by bit, they start to show that they can overcome the technological obstacles here using extreme auto Violet to edge microchips. IT looks like that's really possible.

But then in early one thousand ninety six, rick gets a call from washington saying.

rick, we're terminating the program. Congress is no longer interested and has some concerns about this, looking like corporate welfare. So you basically have about six months to rap things up and move on.

President clinton is trying to baLance the budget. And that seed money for projects like extreme ultraViolet research drives up, meaning that government scientists like rick and andy, they might have to go back to working on, you know, nuclear fusion or national security projects.

And so we were stone, and at the same time, we knew we were on to something. I mean, we knew this was something that was gone to make a difference. So I was, you know, obviously scrambling like the .

future of microchips was kind of hanging in the baLance. The world had been transformed by faster, faster chips, faster and faster computers. But with the current technology, there was a limit to how fast chips could get. The industry would soon be facing a dead end.

Rick realizes that to save all the extreme ultraViolet t research we've been working on, he needed to raise a lot of money fast. So he goes to the big U. S.

Migration companies and says the government is out. Will you make up the difference here? Take on all the financial risk yourselves.

And IT was incredible to watch them sort of sit up saying this cannot happen. We're gonna figure out a way and continue to fund this .

because we think you're going to make IT. wow. So they like made basically .

a giant industrial go on me. So exactly right.

The government seed money had worked. The labs had made so much progress that the biggest companies in the U. S. Microchip industry, companies like intel, wanted them to keep going, and we're willing to make a much bigger investment in this extreme ultraViolet technology.

Intel and other companies supersize the R N, D budget from a couple of million dollars a year to a more than forty million dollars a year. And they define a clear goal. They want the national laws to work together to build a prototype. An actual machine that can etra microchip from start to finish using extreme ultraViolet light is called a lithography machine.

Rick is appointed the chief Operating officer for this huge kind of unprecedented partnership between the national labs and private industry. Basically, he is now the quarterback. Was that a daunting chAllenge?

yes. Yes, IT was um we'd never built a library two on our lives. None of us right?

And extreme motor Violet light is so tRicky to work with that IT takes years but by two thousand one they pull IT off. They have a prototype.

He looked very, very much like a research tool, wasn't pretty, didn't have a pretty exterior. There are a lot of cables all over the place. We thought IT was beautiful in every.

every way. Rick remembers feeling just over the moon, but they had finally proven that this technology was really possible.

The mood was giddy, was exuberance and IT was a sense of pride that was like a mucha. And we landed.

Now that the prototype was built, rick job was mostly over. But now comes the final chapter in the life of a technology that kind of ugly cabling prototype has to become a slick, real world machine when they can sit on the factory floor. In companies all around the world echo tiny circuits onto rims and rims of microchips.

And our original slogan for the program was on the floor. And o ford, we we wanted these tools to be on the semiconductor manufacturer floor in o well, that was ridiculous. We were way, way, way, way too optimistic.

The toughest chAllenges would still .

be to come after the break. IT is one thing to prove that a technology is scientifically possible, but to prove that a technology is commercially viable, that you can make money off of IT, that is something else entirely.

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You hear IT all the time. Some lab announced a revolutionary breakthrough. Scientists have discovered a way to encode data using holograms, or they're able to levitate frogs using magnets, or they've created nanowires stronger than maybe anything in the universe.

But then years later, like nothing seems to come of IT. Where are the frog elevating machines? Where are they? And the main reason that most technologies never make them into the real world boils down to economics like a lot of really cool technology just ends up being too expensive or too in practical or both.

yeah. And for extreme ultraViolet chip making that regional came in the early two thousands. At that point, the U.

S. Microchip industry in the U. S. Government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars proving that this next generation technology could work in the lab.

And now they turned to the final chapter in the life of a technology getting IT to market like some company needed to take all the research and the prototype, and figure out how to make the technology profitable, basically make a commercial version of the machine. And for this chAllenge, the U. S.

Effort turned to a dutch company, A S. M. L.

I think people now, in retrospect, think, oh, like this could have been in american technology, but we passed on the torch to a dutch company.

That's an expression. But you could also say that, U. S. Drop the ball on the sorry for being blunt in the dutch. Yes.

mark hydrant is a dutch business journalist. He's kind of the world's expert on A S. M L.

Wrote a book about IT recently. Mark says sharp, some politicians wanted A U. S. Company to bring these machines to market. The problem was there aren't any great options in the U.

S. The major players at the time where S, M, L and two japanese companies, canon and icon, but canada icon, we're out because the united states saw japan as its mean microchip rival. So the industry turned to A S M L.

A L had been doing its own research into extremely Violet t. And in the early two thousands, IT took on the chAllenge of making a profitable commercial machine. At the time, there is still quite a bit of work left to do.

The prototype was a nice proof concept, but in order to edge a single wafer of microchips, this prototype, not taking a whole day, a commercially viable machine needs to make hundreds of wafers an hour. Otherwise IT just wasn't. That's how brutal the economics of the microchip industry are.

You have to have a machine that keeps on running day and day out without too many troubles, without too many errors. So it's like crazy science and crazy economics. In one machine in .

the beginning as a was pretty sure they could get the science and the economics to work. They thought they could make a machine ready to go into factories by two thousand six, not quite on the floor in four, but clough.

the main problem, the pat tackle, was gathering enough extreme ultraViolet light to h microchips. You need a lot of light. The more like you have, the faster the machine can go.

But for the longest time, A, M, L, couldn't get that extreme ultraViolet light bright enough. And once you get to see one of their machines up close, you start to understand why. Now, yes, yes, please.

that is alex. He is the heads of engineering and ASS3 d ago lab， which jeff to visit. He says there just isn't any simple way to generate extreme lta Violet light.

Remember, this is the part that sounds like science fiction. First, you needed a giant laser. Alex takes me to one of their laser rooms.

IT has rose and rose of these like six foot tall beige cabinets. This entire room powers just one laser. Can I ask why that red light is rotating? Looks like an alarm light, the laser ers armed in. Good to know.

but this laser itself did not produce extreme ultraViolet light. There's just a regular laser, i'll be IT supersized. But then the laser had to hit that drop of multi ton, create that super hot plasma, and that would give off a flash of extreme ultraViolet light. And in order to get enough extremely Violet late, they needed these ten plasma explosions to happen fifty thousand times a second.

Yeah, alex takes me to a test chAmber. Looks like a big metal super pipe with a plexiglass window. On one side, we're about to see something that very few people have seen inside, is a mazel spitting out these multon ten droplets.

And we've lit up the chAmber with a flashlight so that you can visually see the spider web looking string of drop lets. IT does IT looks like a look like a very thin spider web. IT took years to figure out how to make that the silvery spiderweb. The engineers had to come up with clever ways to vibrate the azel. So every drop, let would be the exact same size and shape.

There were hundreds and hundreds of engineering chAllenges like this. And every time they solved one problem, another one would pop up. By two thousand and six, the original deadline, they had a machine, but I was too slow and IT broke down too often.

A S, M, L told the industry, its customers, its investors, just give us another year, one more year, they said that year after year after year.

by two thousand and eleven, asm s, japanese rivals cannon and icon had given up on extremely orbited let technology and some of the exact at A S M L were wondering if they should give up too. They went to their customers, chip makers like intel, and ask them, are you absolutely sure that you still want these machines? It's gonna take more time, more money. Maybe you should just call IT now.

but the chip makers are like, no, no, no, no, no. We still want these machines because without them, progress will slow and we're not really sure how to make faster chips. So A, S, M, L.

Forged ahead. And in twenty seventeen, they did IT back at the lab. I suit up to see the final product.

Alex leads me into what looks like a cavern or feature return the quarter. And this is the plasma vessel. Ahead of us is this stainless steel sphere.

The size of a car. Inside this sphere is where the tin droplet meets the giant laser. The plasma from the explosion gets forty times harder than the surface of the sun.

A nearby screen shows what's happening inside. I can see a steady purple glow. This light source is currently making plasma.

So we just running right now. Running right now. Tell me that is running right now.

Standing there was kind of terrifying, all those violent explosions happening fifty thousand times a second. Inside that chAmber you're seeing just the glow, this hot plasma. Oh my god, yeah, we're making plasma.

What we were looking at, that purple, glowing plasma IT, was the cultivation of almost forty years of research, started in the one thousand nine and eighties, with people andy, dreaming of this new way of making microchips. IT was nurtured through the nineties by this partnership between the U. S.

Microchip industry and us. Nuclear weapons laboratories. And then for almost twenty years, IT was in the hands of A S. M, L, who finally brought IT to market.

And that final chapter tends to be the hardest and the most expensive part in the life of a new technology. In this case, the early research and prototype had caused U. S.

Taxpayers and U. S. Companies may be three hundred, four hundred million dollars, but A S M L says after they picked up the baton on, they spent about fifteen times that amount, more than six billion dollars.

It's funny. A S M L X X say, if they had known how much IT cost, how wrong IT take, they probably wouldn't have taken a bet on this technology, but their gamble paid off. A M L now controls maybe the most valuable technology in the its latest extreme ultraViolet chines go for about three hundred eighty million dollars each.

There are some of the most complicated objects that humans have ever built, and they've become indispensable. They're used by companies like intel, T S M C and samsung. They're producing the chips, powers the most advanced A I models, and, you know, advanced to chip technology like this IT kind of feels like inevitable, feels like one of the most basic underlying facts of our modern world. But this stuff almost didn't happen.

This epo de was produced by willa rubin and edited by judging IT was backed by Daniel sulema and engineered by Patrick murray. Our scold mark is our executive producer.

Special thanks to john carothers, danny Brown Andray lifelike and georgie versand a and if you're interested, markets book about asm, it's called focus the asm way. I'm just and .

i'm Sally home. This is npr. Thanks for listening.

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