The recent death of the great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke prompted me to recall his famous three \u201claws\u201d (from the 1973 edition of his book of essays Profiles of the Future<\/i>):<\/p>\n
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
\n2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
\n3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.<\/p>\n
The last law is a favorite in a world where very few of us have even the slightest idea how most of our essential gadgets work. But the first two laws I think are more interesting, and revealing.<\/p>\n
In particular, the first law hits close to home for me. First, let us be clear what Clarke meant. He defined \u201celderly\u201d in this context as any scientist over 30, or possibly 40 in some cases. Thus, I easily qualify as an elderly scientist, and some (who don\u2019t quite know me well enough) might even regard me as distinguished. So I began to think about past pronouncements I\u2019ve made as to what is \u201cimpossible\u201d in the field of lithography. The most obvious category is next generation lithographies, where I have made many public statements of the kind \u201c193 nm lithography forever\u201d and \u201cEUV will never work\u201d. Could it be that I am a classic example of Clarke\u2019s first law, and that I am \u201cvery probably wrong\u201d?<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think so. Let me explain why. First, I don\u2019t think that EUV lithography is impossible. In fact, I am quite confident that the many smart people working on that technology will be able to demonstrate very high resolution with EUV and be able produce working high-end chips in the very near future. EUV lithography is not impossible, it is just uneconomical. Tool costs coupled with throughput (not to mention defects) will render EUV lithography fundamentally too expensive. The technology is certainly feasible, but the economic realities of semiconductor manufacturing are even more harsh than the realities of the limits of physics. The important question to our industry is not \u201cCan you do it?\u201d, but \u201cCan you do it for a dollar?\u201d EUV can\u2019t, and in my expert opinion never will.<\/p>\n
By the way, in 1999 Clarke added a fourth law: \u201cFor every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.\u201d Keep that in mind when pondering my expert opinions on the fate of EUV lithography.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The recent death of the great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke prompted me to recall his famous three \u201claws\u201d (from the 1973 edition of his book of essays Profiles of the Future): 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}