Lithography — New Controls at the Tip of the Chip-War Spear
Today’s breakdown is authored by “ Lithos Graphien,” an anonymous contributor with decades of experience in the lithography industry.
65 years ago, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor envisioned a way to make complex electronics using a printing process known as semiconductor lithography. Thus, the monolithic integrated circuit — or microchip — was born.
Not long after, Noyce co-founded Intel with Gordon Moore, who famously observed in 1965 that the number of transistors (electronic switches) on Intel’s microchips doubled every four years because of improvements in this printing process.
Moore’s Law holds to this day, with smaller and smaller circuit parts printed to pack more computational power into each new chip. In the near future, chips the size of your fingernail will contain an astronomical 100 billion transistors.
For this reason, a nation’s lithography capabilities determine the power of the semiconductors they can produce. That’s why lithography tools have been a key focus of US export controls.
