Intel's Newest $350 Million Machine

so that's me with the most expensive piece of equipment in the world what you're seeing is an image of me and a group of other journalists who were invited to Intel's d1x mod 3 Fab in Oregon this is where Intel does all of its most uh Advanced R&D Research into next Generation techniques to develop future generations of chips now what you're seeing here is the first commercial installation of a high na euv machine Intel made a big song and dance about it in 2023 as it was getting the first shipments in through from asml in order to build this machine that's going to power the future of Intel's road map the reason why we were invited is that the machine is almost complete in its installation normally these machines go through uh a period of four to six months of installation then a few months of optimization and dialing in the settings to make sure that they're exact what Intel are here they're up to that dialing in the setting stage the hardware is in it's now all about the fine tuning now this is the world's first commercial High NAA euv tool that's high Ina numerical aperture euv extreme ultraviolet now euv extreme ultraviolet is 13.5 nanom wavelength of light of em radiation and the high in a here refers to the numerical aperture of the Optics inside the machine standard euv as used at tsmc 7 NM and from Intel 4 nanometer is 0.35 na this new machine ups that to 0.55 na why is that important it means you can draw features on Silicon with smaller and smaller line widths that means the density can increase and the idea is you get a better product at the end the result is more transistors higher density and if your architecture team is right then the product that will come out will be higher performance or lower power um and with better cost metrics than what's come previous now the high na tool here costs we estimate around 350 million dollar uh asml has actually recently announced that they're starting to ship a second commercial grade tool out into the ecosystem they won't say where and last year they said they have orders for at least five on the books if we go to the regular euv machines the ones that have been in production for quite a while they've sold a good number I think the latest is around a hundred of those and they're about 150 million each This Is A Step Above because the Optics are ever more complex the size of this this machine is somewhat unfathomable I mean it's hard to see the perspectives here but we've got Boll of people walking around the structure standard normal sized people this thing is around two 2 and a half three stories high so yeah this thing is immense it weighs 150 tons what SML did here is they shipped all the equipment over to Seattle through Air Freight and then use land Freight to deliver over 20 truckloads worth of equipment over 100 thousand different individual Parts all coming from asml and asml suppliers that's why it takes so long to do it and and as I said before we're going from this uh going from construction into the calibration phase I have some other statistics here so underneath the high Anda tool is the subfab this is where um all the chemicals and power and Stuff This Ss where that all gets sorted and the design of high and is a lot different to how it was with regular na euv with regular euv the amount of space in the subfab was up to six times the amount of the floor plan of one of these machines now floor plan is all critical because they try and pack them in incredibly densely in this case they've managed to make the uh High and a tool the equivalent floor space in the subab underneath there they hold hold uh the lasers that P power the Optics now I'll show a I'll show uh a picture of the tool and we can see the Optics is going to be on the right hand side of this tool in order to get what they need they use 630 KW CO2 lasers um so six of those was 180 KW uh these are ganged together and pulsed at 50,000 times a second now CO2 lasers aren't extreme ultraviolet what they have is a continuous feed tin droplet system now this is just going to sound like crazy science fiction in a vacuum they atomize tin droplets and fire them into the machine these CO2 lasers hit the tin droplet once to flatten it and then again with a particular angle of instance that fires x-rays or in this case High na uh e V 13.5 nanometer that then goes through all the Optics this 0.55 Na and then that's what prints um the pattern from The Mask onto the wafer now one of the potential benefits of high na is that with the smaller line widths you can print you only need to do one run through you only need to print once per layer on the wafer in order to to do that with regular na euv you might have to move on to double patenting which means you have to go twice through and double patting is arguably less accurate than using finer Optics in this regard the rated uh speed of this machine is5 Wafers per hour but that's at 20 m per square cm now think about it I've just said that the CO2 lasers in this thing equate up to 180 kilow and as a result you're firing 20 Mill per square cm in order to get this uh High na euv pattern onto the Silicon that is one of the worst conversion factors of energy you'll ever see however it's vital in order to get the exact detail onto the wafer now these machines are actually run at perhaps around 50 60 Mill per square cm and the output of the Wafers per hour scales linearly um neither Intel nor tsmc nor Samsung or anybody else with euv machines will ever tell you what dose this Mill per square cm that they're using um because it's a fundamental part of the IP of Wafers going through the their Fab however we do know that asml and partners and The Foundry provides are trying to minimize that dose so they can put as many Wafers through the machine as possible now what's unique about the high Anda machine here normally with these machines what would happen is asml will build it until it works Works make sure that it's got a right combination of parts that work together then dismantle it then ship it off to the customer with this first tool in order for Intel to get the jump on everybody else they're doing something slightly different Intel is chronologically speaking 3 to four weeks behind asml in asl's development of their own internal testing tool normally this would be more like 6 months but in this time but now we're at 3 to 4 weeks this means that asml is only very slightly ahead and any time asml does a change or a tweak or an optimization it feeds back through to Intel and then Intel does the same thing to try and match what asml is seeing internally which means that asml can show off a wafer like this it doesn't look like much however what we're seeing is line widths of the order of 10 NM with regular euv the limit we've got to today is 13 NM that's so line space line and the width of those lines and the width of those spaces were 13 nanm that's with regular euv the 0.33 na with the high na 0.55 na those line widths are expected to go to 8 nanometers what asml is showing off in this wafer and here's a picture of me trying to take a bite of this wafer is that they've reached the Milestone of 10 nanm the smallest lines printed in a Mass Production Tool they've managed to make 10 nanometers in um you know in the lab using uh you know non high volume manufacturing tools but this is on a high volume manufacturing tool they've managed to get 10 nanometer line width so incredibly small and Incredibly going to be dense when we when the pdks for these parts are going to be developed Now intel has showcased that the high Anda part of their road map is going to occur after Intel 18a so this is going to be Intel 14a which we expect is going to be in the 2027 2028 time frame so as a result they've still got several years to get this together to ramp up to make sure that they can run all the test vehicles uh on this machine to make sure that they can go after any you know potential defects that this machine uh might acre because it's so different to regular euv in terms of how it's designed while the physics is only slightly different the manufacturing tool itself is vastly different however there is is good news on Horizon for that because after high na euv is hyper na euv this is a video I want to do separately but hyper na is 0.75 what the committee around asml and its customers have done is said we want the 0.75 design to be essentially an easy install upgrade from 0.55 this means it's not going to take another $350 million machine instead it might just take a 300 million dollar you know mirror and Optics inside but the idea is that they don't have to go through uh the arduous task of uh designating a bigger space inside the Fab uh more infrastructure to be able to sport it it should just be an easier slot in now to correct a few things out there just because Intel is installing a high na euv tool doesn't mean they're ripping out their regular euv tools what based on some of the comments online uh in recent months it's important to note here that 90% of all the tools that asml have ever shipped in the lifetime are still in operation today as part of this tour we had uh CBS Bloomberg I was there um we had Mike rug from The Oregonian um and a couple of other local uh press and an asml representative and she was saying how yeah all this equipment the lifetime of it is is is incredibly long and built to last with Intel's new IDM strategy previously they used to ramp up a new volume node and then as the new one came online they'd rip out the old one and then they would only ever keep really the latest generation up with then you found your module they're going to keep um they're going to keep high volume process nodes going to the point where they can offer them to customers in the ecosystem that need high volume silicon man manufacturing and then you know packaging with the with the other side of their business that means that any euv or high euv tool that Intel is installing it's going to stay there a long long long long time and uh CEO Pat girl saying you is making sure that that is a foundation of the next generation of revenue for the company now going on a Fab tour is an incredibly marvelous thing um 99.99% of the time No cameras allowed all the pictures you're seeing today were either taken by Intel's official photographer on the day or from CBS CBS got special dispensation to bring their cameras in they allow to be vetted and cleaned for such a clean room however the only agreement is that any material that they take they got to share with everybody else on the tour including Intel so that's why we're showing you some some of this amazing footage that came out of there I have been in a total of a Fab seven times now which is more than your average uh person in this industry I think I've been to that Oregon facility now three times uh I'll link to some of the other videos that I've done previously such as putting on a bunny suit to go in there and that time I actually touched newv machine during the height of the Silicon shortages a couple of years ago I've also visited Intel in uh Malaysia in Israel uh I've seen the IBM 2 nanometer facility up in Upstate New York um and also uh Global foundaries Malta Fab when they had euv machines I've got an interview with the global Foundry CEO about what they did with those euv machines which again you'll find link below or I'll put a card up uh somewhere up there going into the Fab at this point has become a bit of a a bit of a ritual a bit of a routine you it's you know you're given specialist paper and a pen I mean this is a notebook I had to write on these notebooks are essentially almost plastic vinyl and using specialized pens such that you don't get any fibers into the air um the clean rooms that the Fabs work in are a thousand times cleaner as than an operating room um but you go in you know take notes ask questions on this tour was Dr Mark Phillips he's the head of lithography at Intel so while he doesn't necessarily deal in product or even process node head of lithography means make sure these machines work and these machines work in high volume so he deals with a lot of those I think we got to get him on the channel at some point for a proper proper interview to ask about how Intel uh is enabling uh euv uh what the next processes steps in lithography and some of the new techniques because I know that there are some companies with some uh new techniques in the process line that are going to help with the throughput of some of these Wafers to get to the more advanced process nodes but he was there he was giving a wide explanation because most press there had never been in a FB before or didn't even really know what a process node was um so they got a grash course on the latest generation of Hardware um I always like the fact that these uh these machines are just massive in scale and so incredibly complex I've had the pleasure of seeing one essentially half built and you get to see all uh the super accurate uh molded aluminium inside and all the pipes where all the gas is and all all the stuff goes I even managed to find one of the suppliers that uh provides the tin for the tin droplet mechanism um I was talking about because the first EV machines didn't have a continuous feed mechanism you essentially had to put an ingot in and the Machine would you had to turn off the machine off put the Inger in turn the machine back on it would uh put it under high pressure and vaporize it and that's how you got your tin but you had to shut the machine down the later versions of euv use continuous feed droplet technology which is what we're using today I actually found one of the suppliers for the tin ingots um and I said hey I've got a bunch of questions just you know out of my own personal curiosity you know what is the feed Ray uh how much does it cost that sort of thing they wouldn't answer any questions um just go to show you just how much of that how much of this is kept under lock and key in kept secret um there was a question on the tour about well hang on isn't this you know National Security type uh protection because Intel's trying to bring man manufacturing back into the US uh and Intel said yes however as you may notice from these shots certain parts are blurred and they designed this tour such that those that were filming could actually get you know maximum filling out of what they were filming um unlike last time when I visited uh we had to go through with a very fine tooth tooth comb and blur out everything that needs to be blurred out um if anyone gets a chance to go on a Fab tour I highly recommend commend it they're very rare few and far between the fact that I've been on seven is amazing uh didn't expect to go that you know I think my first one was like in 2016 so to do all of those since then uh I think is quite amazing uh I've got open offers to go visit uh more of global Foundry facilities for example I'm fingers crossed Samsung opens up in due course there was there were meant to be Fab tours from Samsung in 2020 however Co happened uh tsmc there's the the only tour in recent memory I can remember is BBC got to go in about four or five years ago pre pandemic to do a 4minute short video about the latest generation technology and that's it I've never heard of or seen of a press tour uh since however with Mor says he has been built in the US and the competition uh increasing for the Leading Edge Technologies especially packaging I I expect some of these Fabs are going to eventually open up as as they get more competitive and as we enable this next generation of uh euv G all around transistor technology we're going into Fork sheets and then 2D materials uh that stacked uh transistors C fets complimentary fets they're also in the works and upcoming up up upcoming up is actually uh the imch Futures ITF world as it's now known that's going to be in a couple of weeks over in Belgium that's going to be a fascinating look into the future of transistor technology and how we get there um I would love to say that I'm going unfortunately I have a clash but if you're looking out for new ways into transistor technology more information about what's coming up in the future then uh IM futures or ITF world is is a good place to start my mestation here is let me eat a goddamn wafer um still in calibration phase so uh we're going to time it and and make sure that Intel's ready come on clock's ticking [Laughter] [Music]

Channel: TechTechPotato

Views: 189,234

Keywords: Intel, EUV, High-NA, Extreme Ultra Violet, $350 million, ASML, NXE:5000, Oregon, fab, foundry, IDM 2.0, Pat Gelsinger, best chip, 14A, 18A, 1.4 nanometer, big, chip, energy, co2 laser, tin droplet, tsmc, samsung, ai, machine learning

Id: 8i9rs4LNSlI

Length: 19min 17sec (1157 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2024