That's not a dumb question at all! They're next in line, but there's a long road ahead!
Modern EUV lithography uses 13.7nm light, barely shy of the 10nm cutoff for X-Rays (and that's debatable). Many of the problems we'll need to solve are already in-play with EUV lithography, but with X-Rays they will be turned up to 11. Directing the light is a huge one, most materials are transparent to X-Rays so lenses aren't going to work, and mirrors are difficult. Building an EUV or X-Ray mirror requires coating stacks tens to hundreds of nano-meter thick layers thick but still can't manage very high reflectivity. Also, at these energies, the light easily ionizes substrate atoms knocking electrons out which travel around and affect nearby atoms, causing weird non-local stochastic effects.
We've barely started EUV production, there's plenty of room for optimization, so I'd bet we're decades away from using X-Rays commercially, but you better believe we're trying!
Modern EUV lithography uses 13.7nm light, barely shy of the 10nm cutoff for X-Rays (and that's debatable). Many of the problems we'll need to solve are already in-play with EUV lithography, but with X-Rays they will be turned up to 11. Directing the light is a huge one, most materials are transparent to X-Rays so lenses aren't going to work, and mirrors are difficult. Building an EUV or X-Ray mirror requires coating stacks tens to hundreds of nano-meter thick layers thick but still can't manage very high reflectivity. Also, at these energies, the light easily ionizes substrate atoms knocking electrons out which travel around and affect nearby atoms, causing weird non-local stochastic effects.
We've barely started EUV production, there's plenty of room for optimization, so I'd bet we're decades away from using X-Rays commercially, but you better believe we're trying!
https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/x-ray-litho...