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Nobody has yet come up with a better approach to generating focused soft X-rays than that tin plasma nightmare. The "light source" today is the size of a 3-story house to get 250W on target. One of the main reasons wafer fabs now cost so much.

There must be a better way.



> The "light source" today is the size of a 3-story house to get 250W on target. One of the main reasons wafer fabs now cost so much.

Yes, EUV machines are said to increase fab electricity consumption few times over, over regular UV steppers.

> There must be a better way.

The better way may well be worse. The alternative proposal is to build the whole fab around a synchrotron.


There are several "tabletop synchrotron" projects, but as yet none with the right output for an IC fab. Hopefully someone will solve this problem.


Synchrotrons would not be better by much. Efficiencies will still be just above single digits, which still means multimegawatt light sources.

That's still better than tens of megawatt light sources.




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