Chipmaking is an incredibly complex process that only gets more so to meet the needs of smaller, more intricate chips. It requires lithography machines to print and scale these silicon thinking machines. High Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet, or High NA EUV, lithography tools are among some of the newest and most cutting-edge methods of making chips. These have been recently applied to the industry by big players like Intel in the hopes of stepping ahead of the game, but they might have been beaten to the punch when it comes to commercial application of these machines.
A High NA EUV lithography system has just been set up for mass production by SK hynix in its M16 fab based in Icheon, South Korea. SK hynix is a company known for making storage and memory chips. Its using a TWINSCAN EXE:5200B lithography system, as opposed to the 5000 that Intel setup last year, in an effort to produce what will likely be some of the most powerful DRAM ever made.
This new system boasts the ability to print transistors 1.7 times smaller than previous High NA EUV machines. It also delivers 2.9 times the existing transistor densities, providing what SK hynix says is a 40% improvement in the NA to 0.55 from 0.33. The company believes it will be able to pump out better memory than ever before at a lower cost thanks to this new machine.
SK Hynix is targeting the power hungry world of AI computing, which is a trend we are seeing with many of the major PC parts players like Nvidia and Micron, who are all happy to take advantage of this booming tech. Though gaming PCs will surely see some benefit from the latest memory chips.
“We expect the addition of the critical infrastructure to bring our technological vision we have been pursuing into reality,” said SK hynix’s Head of R&D Cha Seon Yong. “We aim to enhance our leadership in the AI memory space with the cutting-edge technology required by the fast-growing AI and next-generation computing markets.”
If SK hynix is able to mass produce things like futuristically complex DRAM with this new lithography system, I'd wager the first places to be kitted out are going to be huge AI data centres.
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