A long-awaited breakthrough in chip-making technology is inching closer towards commercial reality. But progress is slow and remains uncertain.

At Thursday's Research@Intel event in Mountain View, California, The Reg and other press folk sat down with Mike Mayberry, Intel's VP of technology and manufacturing, to discuss the company's future chip-fabrication goals. Among them were extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV), which will help to cost-effectively shrink chip manufacturing below 32nm.

Source:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/20/euv/

ah ultra violet etching.. its not new tech.. its been used for a few years and even was featured on mythbusters...

could be intersting if thay can perfect it.. bc the acids used to eat aways at the non hard stuff

generates loads of heat..and if the wafers are to thin it can crack the silicon
saw that on plainit discovery when thay were trying to make reflective micro wafers to cool the earth..

this is probably going to be 2020 tech..we wnt see this for a LONG time

Are you talking about the micro-reflectors or are you talking about the 32nm tech? Roadmaps have 22nm process to hit around 2011-2012. The article claims EUV will be in use in 2012-2013. I wonder how far down this EUV process will bring us?

talking about AFTER 32 or 22 nm using the EUV tech...

specially bc of the chemical etching proses needed to remove the non hard material
can crack the silicon...from my understanding CPU's are barely 1mm thick

quite thin and susceptible to heat cracking during production..

yes i know that 32 nm will be mainstream in anther year or 2 and 22 nm isn't far behind

and the EUV tech will probably take us pretty far down given how small an opening light need to pass trough

@ 10 nm standard transistors malfunction due to quantum tunneling-> At some point they will have to optimize architectures instead of trying to shrink the chips.

Hopefully quantum computing picks up faster so we can shrink things even farther.