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Comment by stanleykm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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