Global foundries banked on that, and a Japanese laboratory is building/running a demonstrator.

Isn't that similar to synchrotron x-rays? I just watched a video where they say that that's what people started with before they got to the tin plasma method.

It is somewhat likely that effective free electron laser is locked up behind the invention secrecy act of 1951 as a critical DOD tech.

Is it? And what is "effective? Tabletop? Deskside? Or this: https://www.xfel.eu/ ?

XFEL is

> Wavelength 0.05 to 4.7 nanometres

- https://www.xfel.eu/facility/overview/facts_amp_figures/inde...

which is sufficient and possibly excessive.

Not that I know anything about any of the other considerations in such things. Is 3.4 km "too big"? Is €1.22 bn "too expensive"?

Here’s a paper on some research in this direction:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.35848/1347-4065/acc18c

That's called electron-beam lithography:

> This form of maskless lithography has high resolution but low throughput, limiting its usage to photomask fabrication, low-volume production of semiconductor devices, and research and development. [1]

The beam has to scan across the entire wafer instead of exposing it all at once, so it's extremely slow and uneconomical for mass production.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-beam_lithography

I'm fairly sure they're two different things: e-beam (as per your link) does the reaction with the electrons themselves, whereas FEL uses an electron beam as a lasing medium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-electron_laser

It's worth noting that necessity has tendency to make this possible though: the original CD laser diodes required extreme equipment investment to mass produce.

You could conceive of making the speed up in parallel production.

Or use an 8x8 array of them and have 64bits...err...beams at the same time.

IIRC you can't usefully do that, because the limit is from the combined electric field of the electrons in the beam(s) causing blurriness — more beams at fixed current per beam means more blur.

Treat it like a phased array, with hypermegamodulation by realtime machine learning artificial fuzzy logic, canceling out any blurriness in advance, producing the finest and sharpest turbonanoscalpels, able to etch any sketch, fast. Built to last!

F... yeah!