What does every good little girl or boy want for Christmas? That's right, their very own multi-billion dollar chip fab. Well, that's what I want for Christmas, so get a load of this awesome lego kit.
What you're looking at is a Lego model of an ASML Twinscan EXE:5000. In other words, roughly $400 million worth of advanced EUV lithography-based chip production machinery.
That's the very same cutting-edge machine that Intel recently showed off, claiming to be the world's first customer for the device. The Lego model is pretty complex, coming in at 851 pieces and with the fully assembled model measuring well over a foot long.
But that's peanuts compared to the brain-boggling sophistication of the real Twinscan EXE:5000. In fact, these things are so complicated, we don't know where to begin.
But here's one little tidbit to give you an idea of just what we're dealing with. The machine's extreme ultra-violet light-source operates by generating tiny droplets of molten tin, firing them through a chamber at around 200mph and then striking each droplet with two laser pulses. It's all completely bananas.
Designed to enable chip production nodes of 2nm and beyond, the Twinscan EXE:5000 is the most advanced lithography machine yet. Even Intel's upcoming 18A node doesn't use this machine, nor TSMC's upcoming N2 node, as far as we know. Instead, it'll be used to enable the nodes that succeed even Intel and TSMC's next-gen silicon.
Intel just took delivery of the first of these machines and we're not expecting to be able to buy chips produced with it for several years. (Image credit: ASML)
That means it'll probably be Intel and perhaps AMD CPUs fabbed from around 2027 and Nvidia and AMD GPUs a year or two latter that will be produced on this epic machine.
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Anyway, this kit looks like a lot of fun and is available from the official ASML store, something we weren't previously aware even existed. It's yours for just under $230, which is steep for an impulse toy purchase, but a infinitesimal bagatelle for the world's most advanced lithography kit.
There is, however, a catch. The fine print at the bottom of the ASML Store website is a bit of a bummer. "This site is intended for ASML employees and requires a valid ASML email address for purchasing," it reads. Drat! I don't suppose anyone happens to work at ASML...?
Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go “ping!” He also has a thing for tennis and cars.
