I haven’t watched the video but I’ve for years been fascinated by the technology. Those machines have to be the most high-tech, complex things ever built, and make a Saturn V or Starship look like Lincoln Logs in comparison. For example, photolithography needs a light source. In early chips, they used a (barely) visible light mercury lamp. For modern chips, just the “light bulb” is a 10 ton laser system.
What does the world’s largest industrial laser from TRUMPF have to do with the way we will communicate in the future? Quite a bit, as it turns out. The latest generation of computer chips would not exist without this giant laser, and nor would state-of-the-art smartphones. But first things first: It takes highly complex lithography equipment to produce the latest generation of microchips. Netherlands-based ASML is the only company that manufactures these systems, which work with EUV light. And TRUMPF’s colossal laser is the only device that can generate this EUV light. Weighing more than 10 metric tons, it consists of 450,000 individual parts. As the system’s light source, this laser generates plasma with a temperature of 220,000°C, which is 30 to 40 times hotter than temperatures on the surface of the sun. The giant laser is aimed at a stream of tin droplets inside the lithography system, where it strikes and flattens 50,000 of these tiny droplets every second. Actually, the giant laser takes two shots at each of these tin droplets, with the second hit transforming the flattened droplet into plasma that emits the precious EUV light. Of course, the laser’s light beam has to shaped in a very specific way to strike 50,000 individual droplets per second. The laser shoots compressed light packets at the tin droplets, which is why experts call it a pulsed laser. Each of the 50,000 pulses per second consists of a small, compact group of light particles, hurled at the droplets in a tight bunch. To hit their target properly, they have to arrive at precisely the right instant, not a moment too soon or too late; otherwise, the impact will not flatten the tin droplet. In the worst-case scenario, the second laser shot misses its mark so that the attempt to generate EUV light fails. And that brings us to Michael Kösters.
From here:
Which was a link from this thread