It's definitely an "on the shoulders of giants standing on the shoulders of giants" thing. Insane breakthrough technologies on top of other insane breakthroughs. Firing lasers at microscopic molten drops of metal in a controlled enough manner to get massively consistent results like what??
It’s a mind blowing achievement, nothing below sorcery if you think about it.
ASML machines are hitting tin droplets with 25kW laser 50,000 times a second to turn them into plasma to create the necessary extreme ultraviolet light, and despite generating 500W of EUV, only a small fraction can reach the wafer, due to loses along the way. I believe it was like 10%.
One thing I am curious about - how many generations of process shrink is one of these machines good for? They talk about regular EUV and then High-NA EUV for finer processes, but presumably each machine works for multiple generations of process shrink? If so, what needs to be adjusted to move to a finer generation of lithography and how is it done? Does ASML come in and upgrade the machine for the next process generation, or does it come out of the box already able to deliver to a resolution a few steps beyond the current state of the art?
If you’re interested in this stuff Asianometry has lots of great videos. They’re not all on semiconductors, but he’s done a lot on this history, developments, and what’s going on in that world.
Maybe the high water usage is at some other stage? Or intermediate preceding stages? I'd love to understand more end-to-end, as surely it isn't as easy as popping a wafer in a semi-truck trailer sized lithography machine.
Check out the Branch Education channel, they have a series of videos that explain how the underlying transistors are made in 3d space with multilayer exposures etc.
One thing to understand is that you’re seeing an accumulation of over 50 years of incredible engineering and cutting edge science, these things were invented incrementally.
Lithography is one of many steps, but probably the most important one. You use it to expose a photoresist to create a mask for further processing. After exposing the photoresist you need to develop it, remove either the exposed or unexposed photoresist. The remaining photoresist then is the mask and you either etch or dope the surface that is not covered by the mask or you deposit material on top. And then you need to remove the mask and start all over again for the next layer. The high water usage comes from repeatedly needing to clean the surface to remove chemicals and photoresist.
I think this clockwork-in-a-vacuum was preceded by eidophors: a projector with a spinning disc of oil that has an image drawn by an electron gun, that is then illuminated by an arc lamp.
The interesting part is the E-Core on A19 Pro are nearly as good as the previous ARM Big Core while only using half the power. I would love to know the die size of the cache and E-Core.
ARM were catching up to Apple in terms of big core, now Apple has leapfrogged in E-Core again. But competition is good. ARM should have some announcement coming in next few months.
Fascinating, what surprises me is that it looks more "fractal" like than other chip dies I've looked at. Perhaps all the newest ones do, however it makes me wonder if part of Apples secret sauce is more sophisticated design tooling.
There is no backside anything here. This may be a photo of a thinned die; silicon is somewhat transparent so you can often see the die structures better from the back because it isn't blocked by the metal stack.
Anand was involved in a scandal recently there [0]. Is he still in that job?
The driving force behind the reviews for mobiles and related topics at AT was Andrei Frumusanu. His reviews had a level of depth very few even on AT could touch. But he left to work for Qualcomm so that ended his reviewer stint.
The “scandal” was unsubstantiated assertions in a Nuvia legal filing. Basically Apple accused Nuvia of poaching employees. In responding trying to show they were good guys, Nuvia said Anand sent them powerpoint slides marked confidential, but they responded that the communication was inappropriate. The case ultimately went to nowhere: https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/01/apple_nuvia_lawsuit/.
This doesn’t mean anything other than some lawyer thought it would be a good optics. I bet Apple’s default powerpoint slide template has confidential headers. And Nuvia would be right to cover its ass by responding the way it did—they don’t want anything marked Apple confidential in their possession even if the actual content of the slide is public information. Inclusion of the correspondence in the Nuvia legal filing could even have been a prophylactic measure, intended to get out in front of the evidence before Apple seized on it to show Nuvia did anything wrong.
Just don’t believe stuff in legal filings. It’s not that they’re untrue, it’s that they’re definitionally self-serving and selected to paint the other side in the worst light possible. That’s a byproduct of our adversarial system.
They might be referring to Substack having a very open policy of having writers of any political (and other) affiliation on the platform, but I don't necessarily see it as a drawback to be so neutral.
Oh, you're so close. The fascists are parasites: they only tolerate liberalism insofar as it allows them to spread their ideas. They desperately want to--and will--silence their opponents as soon as they wield power. They view tolerance as a weakness, and the social contract as a game to be played only until it can be rewritten.
I do not dispute that Nazis can, legally, say what they say. I don't even necessarily think it's bad that their speech is protected. But their speech should have consequences, and platform owners can and should tell them to fuck off.
> But their speech should have consequences, and platform owners can and should tell them to fuck off.
Sure, some platforms do, and some don't, like Substack, that is their prerogative and if people don't like it they can choose not to read them. But we cannot force them to do anything, nor should we.
This. Sorry you're getting down votes at this moment for speaking the truth, but there really is no excuse for anti society anti intellectual illiberalism from the world's literal biggest losers.
Might be the allegations such as those made by David Farrier this August[1]
> Then, last month, Substack sent out a push notification to some users of the Substack app encouraging them to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter. Like, full-Nazi stuff. Not subtle:
followed by a screenshot of a Substack profile full of swastikas describing itself as news for the "National Socialist and White Nationalist Community"
