Featured Image Credit: FlashMovie/Getty
An insane video reveals the hidden power behind all modern technology.
While we know the major players behind the world's most advanced semiconductor chips like Nvidia, AMD and Micron, the engineering behind all these products is truly shocking. Out of all, one company answered an increasingly troubling problem in the tech world, which was producing more computing power in less physical space.
YouTuber Veritasium (hosted by Derek Miller) explored behind the scenes of Dutch-based company ASML, whose work essentially saved the tech industry.
Advert
"For over 50 years, transistors got smaller and smaller and the number you could fit on a chip doubled," Miller explained. This trend became known as Moore's Law.
It has since become 'one of the main drivers of the tech industry,' he added.
ASML's EUV Lithography machine is a highly complex photolithography system that prints microscopic circuit patterns onto silicon wafers to manufacture advanced microchips, using extreme Ultraviolet (EUV). These microchips are used in everything from smartphones and laptops to AI and other electronics.
Costing a whopping $400 million, ASML's latest High-NA EUV models enable even smaller transistors and higher chip density for next-generation computing.
So how does it work?
The machine creates a powerful light source by targeting tiny droplets of molten tin that are 'roughly the size of a white blood cell,' travelling at 250 km/hour.
Pure tin is melted and fired through a nozzle at incredibly high speeds. These microscopic droplets fly through a chamber filled with hydrogen gas. Photon sensors detect exactly when each droplet passes through a 'laser curtain' at which point, powerful CO2 lasers fire.
"It hits one tiny tin droplet three times in a row, heating each one up to over 220,000 Kelvin [219,700 Celcius]," the YouTuber explained. "That's roughly 40 times hotter than the surface of the Sun."
And that's not all. The machine hits '50,000 droplets every single second,' each with perfect timing. According to a spokesperson of ASML, not one of the laser shots ever misses its target.
"Those droplets are travelling through this malestrom of hydrogen flow. The speeds are tremendously high like shooting golf balls through a tornado," ASML San Diego's head of research said. "Then right when it lands at the hole, that's when it needs to get hit by the laser."
When heated to extreme temperatures, the tin droplets vaporise into plasma, releasing EUV light.
The EUV light bounces off a series of incredibly 'smooth' mirrors which focus and direct the light onto silicon wafers coated with light-sensitive material. This process repeats dozens of times, building up layer after layer of circuitry, creating the billions of transistors that make up modern computer chips.
Viewers in the YouTube comments were shocked by our world's technological revolution.
"This thing is genuinly way more sci-fi than most sci-fi machines yet it actually exists," one comment read.
"As an engineer, I find it amazing. As a human being, I find terrifying that every modern cutting edge technology depends on a single company," another user admitted.
