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Why would lithography not scale? We've got plenty of mass production lithography with microchips.
by nick123567 4y ago
Why would lithography not scale? We've got plenty of mass production lithography with microchips.
- akiselev 4y agoEconomically mass producing microchips is only possible because they are 100s of square millimeters in size and very valuable per square mm. Any bigger than that and error rates in the fab process start to destroy the yield. These fibers are used in much bigger applications like body armor or mechanical composite parts where the surface area is on the order of square meters, not millimeters.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoModern panel fabs use fine masking over like 10sq. meters with precision on the same order of this (~dozens of micrometers), and people have successfully shown lithography over similar panel sizes by separate exposures.
- HPsquared 4y agoThe feature size is a LOT bigger than microchips though: "Each knot is around 70 micrometers in height and width, and each fiber has a radius of around 1.7 micrometers" That is, cheaper lithography methods could presumably be used.
- thfuran 4y agoOlder processes are cheaper, but 5nm node costs something like $25,000 per square foot (with around 0.1 defects per square cm, which may result in waste) and doesn't do pieces larger than about 1 foot. That's pretty bad as far as textiles go.