asml news

Sounds like the tin-droplet EUV thing is actually working.

formatting link

formatting link

What's interesting there is their difficulty in hiring: the world is running out of people who are good at electronics.

If there are any kids out there with instincts for real electronics, go for it. You will become increasingly valuable, and playing with circuits is more fun than typing javascript. Let me know if I can help.

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
John Larkin
Loading thread data ...

They're still projecting this EUV crap thru a "blueprint" onto a photosensitive layer on the individual die? This is really backward stuff. Pathetic actually. All morons know how to do is scale.

Reply to
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred

sitive layer on the individual die? This is really backward stuff. Pathetic actually. All morons know how to do is scale.

It's not a "blueprint" but a "mask". And it's a whole lot faster than any k ind of direct write. I spent a couple of years in the mid-1980's working on a "shaped-beam" electron beam microfabricator (which would have worked, bu t was going to cost more to get working than we could afford to invest).

European Semiconductor Structures in Aix-en-Provence bought the Bell Labs s haped beam system, and used it to produce smallish batches of custom integr ated circuits, but the Bell Labs machine was a factor of ten slower than Be ll Labs had promised, and couldn't be made to write fast enough to make a p rofit.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Yes, the EUV passes through a mask, is focussed by a lens [1] and hits resist on the wafer. The mask and the wafer are both in continuous motion during the exposure, and alignment is sub-nm. A chip design, with masks, can cost a quarter of a billion dollars. Not many chips justify using EUV, mostly flash and dram.

Got any better ideas? Ebeam makes the masks but is too slow for production. Imprint, basically rubber stamping, is still an idea. Synchrotrons work but are too big and expensive and slow. Conventional eximer lasers have just used up the periodic table at around 190 nm.

We don't really need EUV, I guess. If ICs stalled at around 20 nm features, life would go on. My pc and hard drives now have more dram gigabytes and rusty terabytes than I need.

[1] the lens looks sort of like a diesel engine. Nothing refracts at 13 nm, so the optics works by grazing-incidence reflection.
--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
John Larkin

ensitive layer on the individual die? This is really backward stuff. Pathet ic actually. All morons know how to do is scale.

kind of direct write. I spent a couple of years in the mid-1980's working on a "shaped-beam" electron beam microfabricator (which would have worked, but was going to cost more to get working than we could afford to invest).

shaped beam system, and used it to produce smallish batches of custom inte grated circuits, but the Bell Labs machine was a factor of ten slower than Bell Labs had promised, and couldn't be made to write fast enough to make a profit.

Does this thing do the whole die at once or do they have to step it across the whole wafer?

Reply to
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred

My interactions with the ASML hiring system suggested that their biggest pr oblem in hiring people was that they were a Philips spin-off, and hired Phi lips personnel officers, who are just as dumb about hiring skilled speciali sts as every other personnel department, but somewhat more self-deluded abo ut their expertise than most.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Though in the 2nd link, quote "Last year, some 100,000 people applied for about 2,500 jobs". That doesn't look like a shortage to me unless the applicants were largely not qualified.

In the US we really have a shortage, at least in analog electronics. Ever since the recent tax reform it is almost like a dam has burst.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

The high-res exposure machines are "scanners", not "steppers" nowadays.

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
John Larkin

Mostly, not qualified. There is a lot of turnover too, which isn't good in for a difficult, complex technology.

How did tax reform affect this? Did it create more demand?

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
John Larkin

If such a company has high turnover they must get to the ground of it, find out why it happens. It is not normal. In the two companies I worked at as an employee we saw very little turn-over. The little we had was often for understandable reasons. Like when the father-in-law of an engineer died from cancer and he took over their huge farm. When we had the good bye announcement I commended him for taking on that kind of responsibility. He essentially sacrificed his career for the family.

It must have, big time. I receive about two serious consulting requests a months while right now and pretty much for the rest of the year I can't take on any more. Not just tire-kicking but projects that are truly "shovel-ready". Such a barrage of requests has never happened in my career (decades).

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

ASML's personnel department is full of experienced Dutch personnel staff.

A recent Ph.D. in Nijmegen surveryed a big bunch of Amsterdam personnel sta ff, and found that they still thought that they ought not to hire anybody o ver forty and encourage anybody over 55 to take early retirement. This was government policy for a brief period in the early 1980's, but by the time w e left, the government was busy pushing up the retirement age. Personnel st aff hadn't got the message.

The ASML personnel department won't have any trouble winnowing down 100,000 applicants to perhaps 10,000 that that they will pass on to engineering to invite in for interview. They will winnow out a lot of the people who ough t to have been interviewed.

Cqambridge Instruments wasn't Dutch but their personnel department had no d ifficulty rejecting a Chinese engineer on not less than three occasions. Ha ppily the guy's wife played badminton with the wife of one of the engineers (Paul Buggs) and the guys CV ended up in the hands of the senior engineer at Cambridge Instruments (Mike Penberth) who liked what he read.

The guy got hired in due course, and revolutionised the way Cambridge Instr uments put it's electron microscope columns together. He got head-hunted of f to America after about three years, but only after the mechanical innovat ion had got its due share of publicity.

You probably haven't got a shortage, but rather a rigid way of looking at j ob applications that rejects rather too many well-qualified applicants.

Using personnel staff to do the first stage of winnowing on job application s saves engineer time, but generates a lot of false negatives. My experienc e was that it also generated a lot of false positives, based on the people I was asked to interview.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Very true.

Even at HP Labs, which had one of the better personnel departments, we found we had to "encourage" them to pass all applications to the engineering managers since they were rejecting sound possibilities.

Personnel department denizens are principally concerned with avoiding being blamed for making a hiring mistake. That leads to bizarre practices; I've even seen one contract design company require handwritten CVs, which were submitted to a graphologist.

All this is likely to be exacerbated by switching to "AI" filtering where /nobody/ can explain why a decision is made "by the computer".

Reply to
Tom Gardner

formatting link

That is a huge mistake. OTOH that sort of behavior has brought me lots of consulting business 8-)

. ... This was government policy for a brief period in

Government at its finest ...

My ground rule when in management positions was that HR was never allowed to winnow anything, except applicants who sent in resumes or cover letters with lots of gross typos. I also wrote the job ads myself or asked the respective hiring managers or engineers to do that. For interviews it was important the the applicant's future peers also interviewed the candidate. After all, they'd have to work together later.

Nope. A true shortage and this one is hardcore.

I always wanted to see all resumes, no censoring. For example, one major mistake of HR departments is to look for people "in the trade". That is wrong. The best production manager I hired for a med tech company was an aerospace engineer with no mad-tech background at all. He even had a commercial pilots license and probably could have flown us all to offsite meetings.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

Yay! Technology changes have made many people obsolete. It's making real electronic designers more valuable.

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
John Larkin

Sometimes their own incompetence does. I have the Wall Street Journal paper edition since about 10 months. They just missed four (!) deliveries in a row and the total of missed deliveries is now almost 20. What is so difficult about making sure that newspaper routes work? I remember when kids did that, successsfully and reliably. When my first year is up they'll probably lose a subscriber. Finding an alternative will be difficult though because the paper is hand-down the best.

It does but the tax reform really put the coals on. Why couldn't that happen 20 years ago?

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

The economic mess that prompted the enthusiasm for early retirement involve d a lot of unemployed young people. Once the mess had gotten sorted out, th e early retirement legislation wasn't taken off the books anything like as fast as it should have been, but the personnel staff were much further behi nd the curve than even the government.

And personnel departments hate it. For them it is a turf war - the idea tha t they can't select the right people for interview is unthinkable, even if they haven't got a clue about what the people they are selecting actually d o.

John Larkin may be seeing an even more desperate shortage than people with fewer silly ideas.

Of course, if he managed to crash the plane the med tech company would have fallen apart. Some companies have got policies about not putting too many key personnel on the same flight.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

s
,

osensitive layer on the individual die? This is really backward stuff. Path etic actually. All morons know how to do is scale.

ny kind of direct write. I spent a couple of years in the mid-1980's workin g on a "shaped-beam" electron beam microfabricator (which would have worked , but was going to cost more to get working than we could afford to invest) .

bs shaped beam system, and used it to produce smallish batches of custom in tegrated circuits, but the Bell Labs machine was a factor of ten slower tha n Bell Labs had promised, and couldn't be made to write fast enough to make a profit.

s the whole wafer?

Yes and yes.

Rick C.

Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

No and yes. The instantaneous field of view is smaller than the die, so the wafer and mask are both in motion during exposure. Back in the day (like 65 nm and larger) litho was done by step and repeat.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Entirely possible. A friend who is a legal recruiter has been profitable f or multiple decades. In 2016 she barely had any placements because most of the legal community was holding it's breath and no one was making moves. Now things have opened up and she is working on a couple of mergers with on e about to close and some individual placements. Rather than happening bec ause of anything specific going on, it is because the business community ha s figured out Trump isn't able to bring down the economy all by himself.

BTW, what taxes were "reformed" exactly? I recall the lower income bracket got some short term tax relief and the high end brackets got permanent tax reductions. Is that what we call "reform", changing the rates?

Rick C.

Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

Yeah, so we can hire from outside the country on H1B visas. :)

Rick C.

Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.