Bij ZDNet is een interessant interview te lezen met Charles Gwyn, de baas van het Extreme Ultraviolet LLC consortium. Deze groep van 150 mensen, afkomstig van onder andere AMD en Intel, is al sinds 1997 bezig met het ontwikkelen van UV-waferscanners, die binnen vier jaar hun intrede zullen doen om chips met transistors van 0.07 micron en kleiner te bakken. De technologie moet het mogelijk gaan maken op 10GHz processors op de markt te brengen, die evenveel werk kunnen doen als miljoenen kostende supercomputers van dit moment. In het interview vertelt Charles over de werking van zijn levenswerk en de lange weg die het team heeft doorlopen:
What obstacles has your team encountered?
Initially there were a whole series of showstoppers. There were many who said we couldn't build the optics--that we couldn't produce a source that would generate sufficient EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) flux--and then the whole system had to operate in a vacuum. It's been a lot of gradual progress, but I think we've made steady progress over the last three years. And we've got some very bright people working in the laboratory on the problem. We have a milestone this spring, which is the demonstration of this (alpha tool), the first full field-scanning tool.
What will people do with chips that are 10GHz and faster?
If you have circuits that operate at 10GHz, which really are representative of the first technology that we will use EUV to build, you could imagine having real-time translators that would translate one language to another. Basically, you would have the equivalent of a supercomputer, found only in labs (right now) on your desktop. And, of course, there are all kinds of graphics and games that continue to use more and more processor speed.
Moore's wet zal, als het ze lukt om het project af te krijgen (ze schatten zelf dat de kans daarop 90% is), zeker weer een decennium kloppend zijn.