Wen Chengling followed Luo Jia away from the office and came to the third underground floor of the Optics Department.

There, Wen Chengling saw a machine and a prototype verification machine, with the model number being the first generation of ultra-lithography.

“Is this a lithography machine?”

Wen Chengling stopped, asked in confusion, and showed a shocked expression.

Commercial-type lithography opportunities are used for outer packaging, and this one is the first generation machine, so the internal components are exposed, and you can see them at a glance through floor-to-ceiling glass.

Wen Chengling was shocked by the design of this machine. It is very large and has as many as six machines, three of which are measuring machines and the other three are standard exposure platforms.

More machines can improve the working efficiency of lithography machines and produce more silicon wafers per hour.

However, while adding machines, it also puts forward higher requirements on the mechanical structure and the shock absorption capacity of the machines, and the difficulty coefficient increases geometrically, so most lithography machines have only two machines.

The lithography machine is the crown of the semiconductor field and requires a dust-free environment. At this moment, Luo Jia and the others were standing outside the laboratory, separated by a layer of glass.

"Do you want to go in and take a look?" Luo Jia asked.

"Is it really possible?" Wen Chengling was slightly stunned, looking very excited.

"Of course, let's change the dustproof suit." Luo Jia said with a smile.

When Wen Chengling went to school and worked in North America, Sino-US relations were not as tense as they are now, so he was aware of things and had seen many of the most cutting-edge technologies in the field of optics in Stanford University's laboratory.

To this day, North America no longer allows Chinese students to enter key scientific and technological fields to study to prevent technology leakage. Semiconductors, life sciences, aerospace, are all banned fields.

However, although Wen Chengling is knowledgeable, he has never seen such an exaggerated lithography machine design. One machine can carry out fully automatic operations on six machines at the same time, and the efficiency should be very high.

While changing into a white dustproof suit, Wen Chengling secretly thought to himself that there has never been a lack of exciting creativity in the history of world science and technology, but it is very difficult to turn creativity into reality. The first generation of Star Technology's machine should still be used for verification, and the completion level should not be too high.

How difficult is lithography machine?

There is only one company in the world that can do euv, that is, Dutch asml.

In the era of ultraviolet light, hundreds of companies around the world appeared in the field of lithography machines. At that time, it was truly full of flowers and wonderful.

However, the good times did not last long. With the introduction of deep ultraviolet light technology, more than 100 companies that originally made lithography machines have dropped sharply to three. Except for Canon, Nikon, and Asml, all other companies were eliminated.

It is not difficult to see from this that a technological progress will bring a serious reshuffle to the entire industry.

Everyone was dead, and the three still alive families naturally made a fortune. They ate hot pot and sang songs, and a lot of money came naturally. Life was simply too comfortable.

Unfortunately, a few years have passed, and as semiconductor technology continues to be innovative, deep ultraviolet lithography has gradually become less capable.

So the second round of technical competition began in the field of lithography machines, and the result of this technical competition was that Canon and Nikon were eliminated, and Dutch Asml became the final winner.

The only super monster in the world that can manufacture extreme ultraviolet euv lithography machines was born!

Such a fierce competition is simply terrible!

You know, Nikon and Canon are by no means vegetarian. They are both the most powerful optical companies in the world.

When talking about them, ordinary people will immediately think of digital cameras and various lenses and other civilian products, but the most powerful and profitable thing in Nikon and Canon is not the civilian field, but medical devices.

When you go to the hospital and spend a thousand yuan to take a CT, the equipment you use is probably made by Canon or Nikon, or Ricoh, Siemens, and Hitachi.

The price of a CT device is as high as tens of millions of yuan. In China alone, there are tens of thousands of sets of CT devices, all from imported ones. You guess how much money has the Neon medical device giant made from China over the years?

Besides, it is not enough to buy a CT machine. It also costs money to buy it from Neon people for supporting software, equipment maintenance, and various consumables.

In short, Canon and Nikon are extremely powerful companies. The leader in the optical field still defeated the Netherlands Asml, which is enough to see that the threshold for this industry is not high, but high to the sky.

Dutch Asml is not an unknown person. Their predecessor was the famous Philips Optics. The objective lens they used came from the world's largest lens field, Carl Zeiss, Germany.

It can be said that the monster asml was created by gathering the entire Europe and adding some of the power of North America.

In the past, asml had no rivals until Xingchen Technology appeared.

Luo Jia was whimsical and decided to overtake the first three generations of core technologies composed of ultraviolet light, deep ultraviolet light and extreme ultraviolet light, and directly enter the fourth generation of lithography machines, ultra-ultraviolet hybrid lasers. The difficulty of this is something that laymen can never understand.

Swish ~

Wen Chengling was thinking when the sealed door of the laboratory suddenly opened in front of him.

He smiled and said seriously to Luo Jia before entering the laboratory: "Mr. Luo, my major is laser and I am confident that I can solve the light source problem of lithography machines, but you should also know that a lithography machine is not enough to have a light source, and I can't do anything about thousands of other core components."

This is a vaccination for Luo Jia. What he said means is that I can help you get ultra-ultraviolet mixed lasers, but I can't do anything other than lasers, and it depends on the power of Xingchen Technology.

Luo Jia just nodded and smiled, and didn't say anything.

The two people soon came to the machine, and Luo Jia said lightly, "This is our first generation machine. It is divided into thirteen major structures, namely laser generator, beam corrector, energy controller, beam shape adjuster, light shield, energy detector, mask plate, mask table, objective lens, measurement table, exposure table, closed frame, and magnetic levitation shock absorption."

Luo Jia pointed to the machine and introduced the complex composition.

Although the name seems simple, even if you think about it with your heel, you can understand that as the crown of the semiconductor industry, how can it be simple?

Take the objective lens of this lithography machine for example. If you think it is something similar to a SLR lens, then you are completely wrong.

The objective lens used by Asml's EUV lithography machine is as high as 1.84 meters and has a width of nearly 70 cm. It is jointly manufactured by German optical giant Carl Zeiss Group and laser giant Aachen Group.

How much does an objective lens cost?

Sorry, no matter how much Luo Jia pays, she can't buy this objective lens.

From the perspective of cost, the cost of this set of objective lens should be around 10 million US dollars, and its complexity and accuracy are enough to be written into the history of optical development.

What Luo Jia showed Wen Chengling was this thing, it was huge and sophisticated, full of a futuristic sense of science fiction movies.

Moreover, the Euv of Asml is the third generation, and Luo Jia is the fourth generation, with ultra-ultraviolet light and a higher technical complexity.

"You have actually achieved this level!" Wen Chengling widened his eyes excitedly and made an incredible voice.

It was a long distance just now and was separated by glass, so I didn't see it very clearly and thought it was a good person.
Chapter completed!