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EUV Chipmaking Inches Forward
szotz writes "You've got falling droplets of molten tin, bright lasers, and fancy evacuated optics. What's not to love about EUV light sources? The fact that we still don't have them in production lines producing chips. Light source maker ASML says it's 'more confident' that the technology's on track now, and that the machines should meet their target brightness by 2015, in time to help pattern the 10nm generation of chips — the next next generation. We'll see. Or then again maybe we won't. The light's outside the visible range."
A 10nm feature size is 1000 times smaller than the first 10um processes of the early 1970s. That is, one million transistors will soon fit into the space that one used to.
Not true, its more than that. The linear dimensions are 1000x smaller, so the area is 1000*1000 times smaller, thus the area difference is a factor of 1 million.
That said, the ratio between the minimum feature size and the dimensions of the transistors apparently has changed as well, so I don't think we will quite get the full million. Also, we are only at ~20nm now, 10nm is a long way out.