Now I'm imaging some retro-50s (ala Fallout) setting where the fancy chipmaking machines use bomb-pumped x-ray lasers. Swords into ploughshares taken too far? Maybe, but who cares!
For this to make sense you would need to expose multiple wafers on each detonation. But then you would need one mask per wafer, and masks are even harder to make than a chip (electron beam, ...)
It might seem crazy but it turns out Synchrotrons are pretty rare machines too… and they are less “operationalised” in an industrial sense than the crazy tech inside the EUV machines… between the vacuum levels needed and the various linear or circular accelerator technologies available, at the end of the day it’s just way more of a pain in the ass to maintain a large industrially pure vacuum machine operating at continuous round the clock fashion. which might seem nuts but talk to anyone who’s works with high vacuum systems about vacuum purity, out gassing and contamination and yeah… it will make sense pretty quickly.
No, I'm guessing it's something else. I can't imagine complexity is the issue, given the nightmare that is the ASML scanner, so I can only guess that some property of the light generated by synchrotrons is troublesome and not easily correctable.
If that's not the case... perhaps there really might be a business opportunity here?
IIRC Tsinghua SSMB ring design has circumference of ~140m for kW EUV light source. My understanding, at least how SSMB was/is being sold is: storage ring technology mature, price per tool / light source will be relative low.
E: tsinghua ssmb update from last year
https://conference-indico.kek.jp/event/160/contributions/287...
EUV machines are a terrible approach to the problem made to work through a huge amount of effort. Look at the size of those things. All to get a little burst of soft X-rays and focus it on a mask and wafer. With a light source that works by using lasers to vaporize a droplet of tin falling in vacuum. Creating an internal mess that has to be cleaned up.
For a decade, people in wafer fab hoped there would be some other way to do this. Small synchrotrons. X-ray lasers. E-beam machines. But those approaches all fizzled out. So what ought to be a physics experiment run occasionally was hammered into being a production technology.
Examples of a commercial technology that hard which went mainstream are rare. There was the image orthicon.[1] That's a TV camera tube. Previous technologies needed very bright light. Zworklin's iconoscope accumulated the image over an entire frame time, but photon to electron conversion was very inefficient. Farnsworth's image dissector had much more efficient photon to electron conversion, because it had a photomultiplier built into the tube, but only the light received from the pixel currently under the scanning beam contributed to the output - there was no full-frame accumulation.
So RCA developed the image orthicon, which combined both of those technologies. It was insanely complicated and expensive. The tube alone cost about US$10,000 in the 1950. Color required three tubes. The tubes required something like ten different power supplies, and control and alignment required hundreds of adjustments. Here's someone trying to restore one.[2] All those racks of equipment for one camera.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Image_orthic...
[2] http://earlytelevision.org/rca_tk41_restoration.html