The end of the road(map)

Martin van den Brink already predicted in 2007 (link in Dutch) that it will be economics, and not physics, that’s going to end chip scaling. Now, fifteen years later, he suggests that the end of the road may be in sight. Although ASML is looking into a successor of high-NA lithography, the CTO seems far from convinced that hyper-NA will prove economically viable. It would take a handful of technological tours de force to make it happen, he intimated.

The truly paranoid might consider this interview part of some sort of high-stakes poker game about who’s going to pay for the development of hyper-NA. I’ll admit to considering that option, but only very briefly. It’s pretty clear that EUV optics are getting prohibitively large. A redesign is required to split big ‘monolithic’ mirrors into many smaller units that can be manufactured in serial processes – if not for the economics, then for the practical matter of transport. Are there even planes large enough?