It was discussed by a bunch of people in the slashdot duplicate story 2 days ago - https://science.slashdot.org/s....

The upshot is that each annihilation makes about 2 GeV (similar to a lowish energy cosmic ray). If you add it all up and convert to more everyday scale units the total is around 30 nano Joules - so not very much. I bet some high energy gamma rays will escape the equipment though.

Yup - Calma is where gdsii came from. Still in use today. The term for release to manufacturing - tapeout - comes from sending a 9-track tape with the gdsii file to the reticle house.

Why do I still read slashdot? People here used to actually know things.

In fact, even OFC (oxygen free copper) or the more commonly used OFHC (oxygen free high conductivity) have oxygen in them. The purest I've ever heard of has an oxygen concentration of around 0.1 ppm. There is no copper in solid form you can get on earth that is oxygen free. The material they used in their Penning trap just has a lot less oxygen than the copper used for more mundane things like wiring. OFHC has been used industrially for at least 100 years (vacuum tubes, magnetrons for WW2 radar, nearly every vacuum system used in semiconductor manufacturing).

In typical slashdot fashion, someone assumes that the entire scientific field knows less than they do. This isn't hard to find, oxygen free copper even has it's own wikipedia page!

At least the display claimed there was helium still in the flask...

There used to be a Helium Museum in Amarillo Texas. For a while Amarillo called itself the Helium Capital of the World.

Of course it can be reclaimed - it just needs specialized equpment and lots of energy. If the equiment designers believed that helium would be available at a sensible price they wouldn't bother including it. Retrofitting it now is a big deal.

Interestingly, while helium make you sound like Mickey Mouse, another common semiconductor gas - sulfur hexafluoride - makes you sound like Darth Vader.

ArXiv is support by donations. While anyone can submit, there is a moderation process. It's more about having an archival resource independent of the peer-reviewed journals.

I worked in industry right out of grad school and have both patents and products to show from that time. The industry scientists and gov't research scientists I've worked with are indistinguishable in terms of skill, dedication, and productivity.

While industry is undoubtably more efficient at making widgets, in the mid 1980's industry essentially abandonded all basic research. At this point, only academia (whose main job is really training more PhDs) and goverment labs are the only places doing basic research. It's worth debating how much to spend on basic research, but without some, all development will ultimately stop.

The fact that you think many gov't "scientists" are either making weapons, poisons, or stifling innovation tells me you know very little about what actually goes on.

Retired fed here. There are many world class research institutions within the US Federal governent. I know of five physics Nobels in my former organization during the time I was there. I suspect the record is even better in medicine/heath/biology. Although I was just an engineer building intruments you couldn't buy commercially, my 200+ publications with 40,000+ citations show that it's not all bureaucracy.

is something like 18-24 months. After that they'll be laying off and closing fabs. How many times has this happened?

I looked at this x-ray source. It's spectrally broad hard x-rays (8keV). Since x-ray mirrors (which suck worse that EUV mirrors) require spectrally narrow beams it would be very difficult to build any sort of projection lithography system with this. While Spectrum has no details I bet they are using a linac to make spectrally narrow soft x-ray beams (500ev or so). Making reticles and photoresists compatible with hard x-rays would require significant development.

Sorry nope. Both EUV and DUV are pulsed in ASML tools. The EUV source actually fires two separate CO2 laser pulses at a tin droplet. The first vaporizes the Sn to make a plasma, the second generates the EUV light by exciting the plasma. The only continuous light source ASML sells is the i-line (365 nm) UV source used for large features in the final device layers.

Heck, throw in special relativity and then you can fly faster than the speed of light.

The laws of thermodynamics? I could see how those might be inconventient too.

Is the NSF really necessary? There might be a better way to organize science, but for the past 50 years or so virtually every US PhD granted in the hard sciences or advanced engineering has been funded using grants from NSF, DOE, ARPA, DARPA, NIH and other federal sources. Without this federal funding (or some stable and well planned replacement) there will be no new scientists.