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Comment by superposeur | Hacker News Reader

Extremely small wavelengths can be achieved using beams of electrons in place of beams of photons, as in Scanning Tunneling Microscopes and electron diffraction.

Do you know if there is any thought of developing “electron beam lithography”, where an electron beam would etch the pattern on silicon and not merely be used as a source of secondary photons?

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Atomic semi might be pursuing that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34907885

Interesting — thanks

As I understand it electron beam lithography exists as a technology (and is maybe used for reticles? not sure) but the throughput is way too low for production. Its several orders of magnitude slower than euv apparently.

Slower because steering a beam around to draw a pattern is much slower than using a light source through a mask to expose the entire pattern at once.

I think electron beams might be used to make some of the masks for regular lithography, but I'm sure there is someone here on HN with actual experience in these areas with actual knowledge ;-)

Yeah I’m just a casual Asianometry viewer and we’ve already reached the limits of my knowledge on this topic.

Interesting. With all the mega bucks and efforts to produce smaller wavelength photon beams, I wonder if a comparable investment would increase throughput? Or maybe there is an insurmountable technical hurdle.

The problem is pretty fundamental. Optical approaches illuminate the whole chip at once. Electron beams have to go transistor by transistor.

Why? What prevents you from illuminating the whole chip with electrons? Can't get an electron source "bright" enough? Uniform enough? The chip can't handle that much current? Or what?

The problem is that you can't make mirrors or lenses for electrons, so the mask can't be bigger than the chip. There's also the significant problem that shooting electrons at things tends to damage them, so making a mask that can survive the process sounds very tricky.

Ebeam-litho is how wafer masks are made for photo-litho. It’s very precise but very very slow…

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