extreme ultraviolet lithography
In plain wordsThe chip-printing technique used for the most advanced chips, which draws circuit patterns with ultra-short-wavelength light. A single Dutch company, ASML, makes all the machines, each costing well over $100 million.
A lithography process that patterns the smallest features of leading-edge chips using light 13.5 nm in wavelength. The light comes from a plasma created by hitting droplets of molten tin with a powerful laser; because air and glass absorb it, the scanner works in vacuum and focuses with multilayer mirrors instead of lenses. It replaced multiple patterning with deep-ultraviolet (193 nm) light for the most critical layers at 7 nm- and 5 nm-class nodesprocess node, n.: The label for a generation of chip-making technology, like '3 nanometer'. Smaller numbers mean newer, denser chips, but the number no longer measures any actual part of the chip. and is in practice required for 3 nm- and 2 nm-class production. ASML of the Netherlands is the only supplier of EUV scanners; a standard tool costs roughly $180–200 million, and the High-NA generation (numerical aperture 0.55), first shipped to Intel for development in December 2023, about $370 million. Because no leading-edge logic chip can be made without it, EUV equipment is a chokepoint in the AI chip supply chain, and ASML does not ship EUV systems to China.
Origin
Hiroo Kinoshita of NTT proposed and demonstrated EUV imaging in the mid-1980s, and Bell Labs published on 13.8 nm soft-X-ray projection lithography in 1991. US national laboratories and chipmakers advanced it through the EUV LLC consortium in the late 1990s; after two decades of development by ASML, high-volume production began in 2018–2019 at Samsung's and TSMC's 7 nm-class nodes.
Related
- process nodeprocess node, n.: The label for a generation of chip-making technology, like '3 nanometer'. Smaller numbers mean newer, denser chips, but the number no longer measures any actual part of the chip.
- semiconductor foundrysemiconductor foundry, n.: A factory company that manufactures chips designed by other companies. Taiwan's TSMC, the largest, makes nearly all of the world's most advanced AI chips.
- Moore's lawMoore's law, n.: Gordon Moore's prediction that chipmakers could pack twice as many transistors onto a chip roughly every two years — a pace that for decades made computers steadily faster and cheaper, and has slowed but not stopped.
- export controls on AI chipsexport controls on AI chips, n.: Government rules that limit which countries and companies may buy the most advanced AI chips and the machines used to make them. The United States uses them mainly to slow China's progress in AI.
- advanced packagingadvanced packaging, n.: Ways of joining several chips very closely inside one package — side by side on a silicon base or stacked on top of each other — so they act almost like one bigger chip.
Mentioned in
process nodeprocess node, n.: The label for a generation of chip-making technology, like '3 nanometer'. Smaller numbers mean newer, denser chips, but the number no longer measures any actual part of the chip., semiconductor foundrysemiconductor foundry, n.: A factory company that manufactures chips designed by other companies. Taiwan's TSMC, the largest, makes nearly all of the world's most advanced AI chips.