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Re:IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips by ars on Thursday July 09, 2015 @04:07PM (#9860348)
> and EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) were supposed to come in

I wonder if they could use electrons instead of light to etch the surface.

Re:IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips by tedsanders on Thursday July 09, 2015 @04:26PM (#9860449)
Electron-beam lithography is a technique that works, but because it's very slow, it's also very expensive. There are efforts to parallelize e-beam writing, but they face hard challenges. For example, if you want to pattern faster, you just need to shoot more electrons. But if you shoot too many electrons, they repel each other and the pattern blurs. It's a difficult problem to overcome, but people are working on it.