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The Ridiculous Engineering Of The World's Most Important Machine

smartcooky

Penultimate Amazing
smartcooky
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As an engineer, I find this video utterly fascinating. Veritasium delves into the origins of ASML's Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, from the first concepts imagined by Japanese scientist Hiroo Kinoshita in the 1980s, who was openly mocked for his ideas, through all the work done at Cornell and Lawrence Livermore and many other places, all the way to development and production of working machines that pretty much make the vast majority of the chips used in all our modern devices today.

The engineering on display here is truly, utterly insane - the video is 55 minutes long and really is worth the time to watch.

 
It's so weird to me, that we characterize as "ridiculous" and "insane" the methodical and painstaking application of known physical laws and properties, to consistently mass-produce something we all depend on and take for granted.

This is some of the most sober and sane engineering going on today. It should be celebrated as such, not sensationalized as the work of madmen.
 
theprestige said:
It's so weird to me, that we characterize as "ridiculous" and "insane" the methodical and painstaking application of known physical laws and properties, to consistently mass-produce something we all depend on and take for granted.

This is some of the most sober and sane engineering going on today. It should be celebrated as such, not sensationalized as the work of madmen.
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Yeah, its not really insane, but it is ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ amazing.

As if having a stream of individual, microscopic sized, equally spaced, molten tin balls, traveling at 250kph isn't amazing enough, they then shoot each one three times with a laser, at a rate of 50,000 shots per second - all to create an extreme UV light source!!
 
Fitting the topic, I'll add the 4 month old video by Branch Education.
(They have lots of awesome videos)

The $200M Machine that Prints Microchips: The EUV Photolithography System:
 
smartcooky said:
As an engineer, I find this video utterly fascinating. Veritasium delves into the origins of ASML's Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, from the first concepts imagined by Japanese scientist Hiroo Kinoshita in the 1980s, who was openly mocked for his ideas, through all the work done at Cornell and Lawrence Livermore and many other places, all the way to development and production of working machines that pretty much make the vast majority of the chips used in all our modern devices today.

The engineering on display here is truly, utterly insane - the video is 55 minutes long and really is worth the time to watch.

...snip...
Click to expand...
I'm sure given the age of many of us here we can remember articles about how we couldn't go "smaller", yet time and time again people have pushed past those "couldn'ts" - amazing.
 
Darat said:
I'm sure given the age of many of us here we can remember articles about how we couldn't go "smaller", yet time and time again people have pushed past those "couldn'ts" - amazing.
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Yes, I remember as a student when micron-scale features were standard but the state of the art was marching toward ever more unlikely sounding scales. And I became aware of what a relentless march it was when a Siemens fabrication plant opened and almost immediately closed in NE England as by the time it was operational, it couldn't produce devices you could profitably sell any more.
 
theprestige said:
It sure is amazing.

So why call it ridiculous? Why call it insane?
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YouTube. Without a clickbait title nobody would watch it. OTOH I didn't watch it because it had a clickbait title that gave no clue as to what it was about. Unfortunately this is the future of YouTube. There's so much content, and not enough time to view even the stuff you are really interested in - even when you are retired like me.

The other problem is AI slop. YouTube's primary purpose now is 'monetization'. Create videos that get clicks and you get money. Who cares whether anyone gets any value from the videos themselves - that's not important. So now 'content creators' are using AI to do the hard part, spitting out worthless videos at a ridiculous pace. The result is that viewers are getting picky, which means titles have to be even more click-baity to get their attention.

Where will it end? I don't know, but this has been going on in print media for over 100 years. The National Enquirer started publishing in 1926. The Daily Mail was founded in 1896. Here's a great cover from the Sunday Sport (also founded in 1896):-
hilterwoman.jpg
and my favorite:-
grsdebb.png
Which was 100% true BTW.
 
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Mojo said:
It was?
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That surprised me too. Id have put the Sunday Sport around 1986 rather than 1896.

I can remember becoming aware of it in the mid to late 80s when they were still putting a bit of effort into their absurdity. "WW2 Bomber found on moon" is one that sticks in my mind. (Claiming Hitler escaped in a "B-52" to a secret moon base, illustrated with a photo of a model B-29 in a moon crater). The next weekend's front page photo was just the crater. "Bomber disappears from moon."
 
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