This is such a well-produced video by one of my favorite youtube channels, Veritasium. The video explains ASML’s 17-year long quest to build a EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) lithography machine. The R&D cost for this project were €6 billion and the project was close to be shut down on multiple occasions.

They are the most complex (commercial) machines built to date. They use 13.5nm EUV light to print 3nm–5nm process nodes onto modern chips. This allows for example TSMC to manufacture the latest Apple M5 chip (3nm architecture).

The technical challenges ASML had to overcome to get the lithography process to work at this precision are mind boggling. For example, to create the EUV light, they are shooting a laser at 50,000 molten tin droplets per second. This creates plasma hotter than the sun, which then emits the light at the required wavelength.

The video also sheds light (pun intended) onto one of ASML’s partners, Carl Zeiss SMT   , which manufactures the absurdly clean and smooth optical elements of the machine.

It will be interesting to see what will happen in the next years. Currently ASML is the only company that can manufacture these EUV lithography machines. Their TWINSCAN NXE:3800E machine can produce chips with 2nm logic nodes. ASML is not allowed to export their machines to China. However, It has been reported a few weeks ago   that a research team in Shenzen has built a working prototype for EVM lithography. The research team consists of former ASML engineers who helped reverse engineer some of the components. The goal of the project is to produce working chips from this prototype between 2028-2030.