Reid Burke

Andrew Côté:

So then why would Terafab need a Free Electron Laser, and why wouldn’t they just use what ASML does currently, laser-tin droplet ablation? To answer this we should start at the beginning: the fundamental physics of semiconductor photolithography.

Laser-tin droplet ablation has low efficiency, requires one light source per scanner, and yield quality is limited by available photon power:

The last one is a real doozy – as an example, for Intel chips i5, i7 and i9 all come off the same silicon wafers using the same masks, the difference is in the statistical error rates induced by limited or irregular photon power during the masking process.

EUV light contributes ~40% of overall fab costs. Using an alternative light source can reduce the EUV cost by 50% which would contribute to a 20% reduction in overall fab costs. And yields would be much better.

Apple:

Apple today announced a new multiyear commitment with Broadcom to design and produce custom silicon components and cutting-edge wireless connectivity technologies for a wide range of Apple products. The new agreement, expected to exceed $30 billion, will lead to the production of more than 15 billion U.S.-made chips and support hundreds of American jobs.

Apple has been working with the administration and businesses across the U.S. to help create an end-to-end silicon supply chain in America, and today’s announcement advances those efforts.

Broadcom will produce advanced radio frequency components — including FBAR filters — and advanced wireless connectivity technologies at the Fort Collins facility.

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From Thin-film bulk acoustic resonator on Grokipedia:

Thin-film bulk acoustic resonators (FBARs) are widely employed in radio frequency filters and duplexers due to their ability to provide high-quality factor operation, low insertion loss, and compact size, making them essential components in wireless communication front-ends.

Duplexers, which simultaneously support transmit and receive paths while isolating them, represent a primary application of FBAR technology, particularly in handset antennas operating at frequencies from 900 MHz to over 5 GHz. 

Apple Security Engineering and Architecture (SEAR), User Privacy, Core Operating Systems (Core OS), Services Engineering (ASE), and Machine Learning and AI (AIML):

Alongside the next generation of Apple Intelligence, today we’re expanding Private Cloud Compute (PCC) beyond Apple’s data centers. 

[…]

What’s new with PCC on Google Cloud is the implementation: NVIDIA Confidential Computing with NVIDIA GPUs, Intel CPUs with TDX, and Google’s Titan chip. On this foundation, Apple and Google collaborated to build capabilities that go far beyond a traditional confidential computing deployment.