Transcript
Ben Cohen (0:03)
You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries. You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns.
Unknown Advertiser (0:10)
McDonald's breakfast comes first. Ba ba ba ba ba.
Ben Cohen (0:20)
Microchips are used everywhere. In cars, gaming consoles, medical devices, microwaves, wind turbines, toothbrushes. There are microchips in whatever you're using. To listen to this podcast and to make the most cutting edge of those chips, you need an extreme Ultraviolet lithography machine, or an EUV machine.
Brianna Hall (0:41)
Pretty much everything that plugs in now has one of our chips in it. Pretty much everything that plugs in has something that's gone through a lithography machine.
Ben Cohen (0:55)
That's Brianna Hall. She talked to me on her lunch break during my rare tour to see one of these machines. Hall is a customer support engineer on one of the few hundred EUV lithography machines in existence. These machines are ludicrously expensive. Each one costs a few hundred million dollars, and they're all made by one company, asml, Originally Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography. These machines have become indispensable, and they depend on the invisible work of customer support engineers like Brianna Hall.
Brianna Hall (1:29)
I just thought my job was awesome. I didn't process the fact that this job is necessary for our entire world to exist as it does.
Ben Cohen (1:40)
From the Wall Street Journal this is the Science of Success. A look at how today's successes could lead to tomorrow's innovations. I'm Ben Cohen. I write a column for the Journal about how people, ideas and teams work and when they thrive. Today, I dive into what might just the most important machine ever made and get a behind the scenes look at the very intricate job of maintaining it. To understand what an EUV lithography machine does, let's review how microchips work. Microchips are made up of a dense network of tiny Think microscopic transistors built in layers on top of some kind of semiconducting material, usually silicon. The existential question of the semiconductor industry is how to pack more and more of those transistors on chips to make them faster. The answer? Shorter and shorter wavelengths of light. ASML's first lithography tools created light at wavelengths of 436 nanometers. The current machines have shrunk that number to 13.5 nanometers. That allows them to fabricate chips at resolutions 10,000 times finer than human hair. The process is complex and was built with scientific technologies that sound more like science fiction. But if we break it down to basics, first the machine has to produce beams of extreme ultraviolet light, which doesn't occur naturally on Earth. To make it, tiny droplets of tin are injected into a vacuum chamber. Then a first pulse of amplified laser light flattens each droplet, and then a second pulse obliterates the droplets, creating a plasma that emits extreme ultraviolet light. That beam of extreme ultraviolet light is then shot into another vacuum chamber where it bounces around and reflects off a template with the chip pattern. And then it prints that pattern multiple times on wafers of silicon. Easy. The process is incredibly intricate and involves breakthroughs so improbable that they were once dismissed as impossible. And maintaining that machine is delicate, constant, and extremely precise. But for Brianna hall, it's just another day at work.