Wen Chengling followed Luo Jia out of the office and came to the third basement floor of the Optics Department.

There, Wen Chengling saw a machine, a verification prototype, the model is the first generation of ultralithography.

"This is a lithography machine?"

Wen Chengling stopped and asked suspiciously, while showing a shocked expression.

The commercial model lithography machine is packaged on the outside, but this is the first generation machine, so the internal components are exposed, and you can see it through the floor-to-ceiling glass.

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

More machines can increase the efficiency of the lithography machine and produce more wafers per hour.

However, while increasing the machine, it also puts forward higher requirements for the mechanical structure and the shock absorption capacity of the machine, and the difficulty coefficient increases geometrically, so the vast majority of lithography machines have only two.

The lithography machine is the crown of the semiconductor field, and it needs a dust-free environment, and at this moment Luo Jia and they are standing outside the laboratory, separated by a layer of glass.

"Would you like to go in and have a look?" Luo Jia asked.

"Really?" Wen Chengling was slightly stunned, looking very excited.

"Of course, let's go change into dust suits." Luo Jia said with a smile.

When Wen Chengling was studying and working in North America, Sino-US relations were not as tense as they are now, so he was knowledgeable and had seen many of the most cutting-edge technologies in the field of optics in the laboratory of Stanford University.

Today, North America has not allowed Chinese students to enter key scientific and technological fields to prevent technology leakage, semiconductors, life sciences, aerospace, all of which are forbidden fields.

But although Wen Chengling is well-informed, he has never seen such an exaggerated lithography machine design, one machine, fully automatic operation on six machines at the same time, the efficiency should be very high.

Wen Chengling changed into a white dustproof suit, while secretly thinking in his heart, in the history of science and technology in the world, there has never been a shortage of wonderful ideas, but it is very difficult to turn ideas into reality.

How difficult is the lithography machine?

There is only one company in the world that can do EUV, and that is ASML in the Netherlands.

In the era of ultraviolet light, there are hundreds of companies around the world in the field of lithography machines.

However, the good times did not last long, with the introduction of deep ultraviolet technology, the original more than 100 companies that manufactured lithography machines were sharply reduced 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 whole industry.

Everyone died, and the three families who were still alive naturally made a lot of money, they were eating hot pot, singing songs, and a lot of money naturally came, and life was not too comfortable.

Unfortunately, a few years later, with the continuous innovation of semiconductor technology, deep ultraviolet lithography has gradually become inadequate.

So the second round of technology competition began in the field of lithography machines, and the result of this technology competition was that Canon and Nikon were out, and ASML of the Netherlands became the final winner.

The world's only super monster capable of manufacturing extreme ultraviolet EUV lithography machines was born!

Such a fierce competition is simply terrifying!

You know, Nikon and Canon are by no means vegetarians, they are both the world's most powerful optical companies.

When it comes to the two of them, ordinary people will immediately think of civilian products such as digital cameras and various lenses, but the most powerful and profitable thing about Nikon and Canon is not the civilian field, but medical devices.

When you go to the hospital and spend about 1,000 yuan to get a CT scan, the equipment used is probably made by Canon or Nikon, or Ricoh, Siemens, Hitachi.

The price of a CT equipment is as high as tens of millions of yuan, and there are tens of thousands of sets of CT equipment in Huaxia alone, all of which are imported.

Besides, it's not the end of buying a CT machine, supporting software, equipment maintenance, and various consumables also cost money to buy from neon people.

All in all, Canon and Nikon are extremely powerful companies, and the existence of the top in the optical field is still miserably defeated by ASML in the Netherlands, which is enough to see that the threshold of this industry is not high, but high to the sky.

The Dutch ASML is not a nobody, their predecessor is the famous Philips Optics, and the objective lenses they use come from the world's largest lens field, the German Carl Optics. ZEISS.

It can be said that it was the gathering of the whole of Europe, plus a part of the power of North America, to create the monster ASML.

In the past, ASML had no rivals until the advent of Xingchen Technology.

Luo Jia whimsically decided to overtake in corners, bypassing the first three generations of core technologies composed of ultraviolet light, deep ultraviolet light, and extreme ultraviolet light, and directly entering the fourth generation of lithography machines, ultra-ultraviolet hybrid lasers.

Swish~

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

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

This can be regarded as a preventive injection for Luo Jia, what he means by this is that I can help you get the ultraviolet hybrid laser out, but I can't do anything other than the laser, and it depends on the strength of Xingchen Technology itself.

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

The two of them soon came to this machine, Luo Jia said lightly, "This is our first generation of machine, it is divided into thirteen structures, namely laser generator, beam corrector, energy controller, beam shape adjuster, light shield, energy detector, mask, mask table, objective lens, measuring table, exposure table, closed frame, magnetic levitation shock absorption." ”

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

Although it may seem simple to hear the name, even if you think about it with your heels, you can understand how it can be simple as the crown of the semiconductor industry.

If you think it's something like a DSLR, you're completely wrong.

The objective lens used in ASML's EUV lithography machine is as high as 1.84 meters high and nearly 70 centimeters wide. ZEISS Group, manufactured in conjunction with laser giant Aachen Group.

How much does an objective cost?

Sorry, no matter how much money Luo Jia pays, he can't buy this set of objective lenses.

From the perspective of cost, the cost of this set of objective lenses should be around 10 million US dollars, and its complexity and precision are enough to be written into the history of optics.

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

Moreover, ASML's EUV is the third generation, and Luojia's is the fourth generation, with ultra-ultraviolet light, and the technical complexity is even higher.

"You've already done that!?" Wen Chengling's eyes widened excitedly and made an incredible sound.

It's a long distance just now, and it's through the glass, so I didn't see it too clearly, and I thought it was a good thing.

Now walking into the dust-free laboratory, Wen Chengling suddenly realized that the completion of this fourth-generation lithography machine has been so high!