Beyond Moore and borderless communications - 10/05/2016
A special day for our tour today: we've already spent half of our planned time here and we have also already visited half of our scheduled companies. The time flies when you're doing interesting and fun stuff, and this completely proves that! Today we visited Cymer, an ASML company specialized in light sources used for photolithography, and MaxLinear, which told us about their Analog Digital Converter (ADC) ICs. Today was also the first time during the tour that we heard about Moore's Law (we definitely thought that we would here that much sooner)!
Our first visit of the day, Cymer, is located near Mexico (San Diego), a mere 66 mile from our hotel. The first thing noticed on the parking lot was the comforting sign indicating that we should watch out step: rattlesnakes might be nearby! Carefully watching our step, we entered the Cymer builder to be welcomed by a whole crew of employees, which started with the origin store of the company. Cymer was founded 1986 by two PhD students which had an extensive knowledge of lasers. The company itself did not become really successful untill 1996. In 2013 they were taken over by ASML, which wanted them to secure the development of the new Extreme Ultra Violet (EUV) light sources.
In the course of 30 years, Cymer has only made a mere 4000 light source, of which 3000 are still running and maintained. Currently they are working on improving their EUV technology, which is actually based on light sources. One high power CO2 laser is used to heat a microscopic droplet of tin, which then emits the EUV (13,5nm) light that will be used in the ASML scanner. There are a lot of technical issues that need to be overcome before the system can actually be used, but they are doing a great job and their EUV light sources are actually already being used around the world! During the visit we got the chance to actually visit their cleanroom and see their light sources, which are enormous!
Next to al these technological advanced devices, we also got the great advice that the American Ballast Point beer would be the same as the Dutch Grolsch. Naturally, we directly checked that when we returned at the hotel: there appeared to be a lot of different kinds of Ballest Point beer. However, the Longfin has been officially approved by Beyond Frontiers!
The second visit, which was at MaxLinear, contained an interesting story about the functioning of Time Interleaved (TI) ADCs. They told about the principle, the errors that can occur (and how to prevent them) and the product they use them in. Followed by an extensive lab tour which showed how they test their ICs (even on-die and which signal generators in a special Faraday cage), we were already at the end of an extensive and interesting day.
During the trip home, something special happened. Every car needed to stop for the US highway control, on the middle of the actual highway. Unknown with this, we already had the registration details of the vehicles ready, but after a really small stop, we could easily continue our way to the evening, again filled with relaxing at the pool!
By: Bob van de Vijver