Creating a powerful, reliable, and manufacturable light source for modern chipmakers is one of the most complex challenges in today's industry. Among all makers of litho systems, only ASML has successfully created EUV light to print the smallest chip features — but one startup has a radical new idea to change the status quo.
Inversion Semiconductor, a San Francisco startup backed by venture capital firm Y Combinator, plans to develop a light source based on a compact particle accelerator, which it claims would be 33 times more powerful than ASML's existing technology and could pave the way for producing finer chip features.
At the heart of Inversion's tech is a 'tabletop' particle accelerator that is 1,000x smaller than traditional particle accelerators and yet can deliver output power of up to 10 kW. Despite its tiny dimensions, Inversion claims that its light source, leveraging the laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) method, can either speed up chipmaking 15 fold (assuming one 10 kW light source powers one lithography system) or power multiple chipmaking tools simultaneously, thereby cutting costs.
