er structures Whereas the conventional method uses light sources with a wavelength of 193 nano meters 7 60e 6 inches the new manufacturing method operates with merely 13 5 nanometers 5 31e 7 inches 1 nanometer is one millionth of one millimeter 0 03 inches It takes very power ful lasers fi ring at tin droplets rushing past inside a vacuum chamber 50 000 times per second to generate a plasma fl ash of this wavelength As a result EUV lithography enables a more deli cate resolution due to which chip manufacturers can produce smaller faster and more powerful chips with manufacturing complexity and costs remaining within reason By now cell phones using chips produced with EUV light are available Another fi eld in which such high performance Complex simulations or processing of large data volumes require computing power of a magnitude that s causing today s computers to reach their limits Responsible for the speed of computer oper ations are so called fi eld eff ect transistors FETs In order to become faster and faster these tran sistors are becoming smaller and smaller so that as many of them as possible can be installed side by side Current computers are already operating with impressive clock speeds of several gigahertz in other words several billion computer operations per second Latest generation transistors have a size of merely 0 000005 millimeters 1 97e 7 inches that s about the limit of their possible miniaturization and that s where laser technolo gy comes into play In an experiment scientists at Friedrich Alexander Universität Erlangen Nürnberg FAU and the University of Rochester in the U S state of New York have shown for the fi rst time how signals can be transmitted via light waves instead of by electricity and transformers and how com puter operations using laser impulses could be executed up to one million times faster than before in this way One oscillation of a light wave lasts only about one femtosecond equating to one mil lionth of one billionth second This is a great example of how fundamental sci ence can lead to new technologies We clari fi ed the role of virtual and real charge carriers in laser induced currents and that opened the way to the creation of ultrafast logic gates said Ignacio Franco from the University of Roches ter Albeit It will probably be a very long time before this technique can be used in a computer chip but at least we know that light wave elec tronics is practically possible Tobias Boolakee from FAU added The EUV project leaders in front of the world s most powerful pulsed industrial laser that is used for generating the light enabling EUV lithography High speed transistors chips might play an important role is autono mous driving because these chips are able to pro vide the system with the data required for driving safety at the requisite speed 61 ENGINEERING

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