ASML has achieved a technological breakthrough that could increase chip production by as much as 50 percent by the end of the decade. The Dutch company has increased the power of the light source in its extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines to 1000 watts, a significant step up from the current 600 watts.
The company explained this in an interview with Reuters. “It’s not a parlor trick or something like this, where we demonstrate for a very short time that it can work,” said Michael Purvis, Lead Technologist at ASML. “It’s a system that can produce 1,000 watts under all the same requirements that you could see at a customer.”
The new power leap means that by 2030, factories will be able to process approximately 330 silicon wafers per hour, compared to 220 today. Depending on the chip size, each wafer contains tens to thousands of chips. “We’d like to make sure that our customers can keep on using EUV at a much lower cost,” said Teun van Gogh, Executive Vice President Business Line EUV NXE at ASML.
Complex solution with tin droplets hotter than the sun
ASML achieves the power increase by doubling what is already a highly complex human invention. To produce light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, the machine shoots a stream of molten tin droplets through a chamber. A huge CO2 laser heats them to plasma, a superheated state of matter in which the tin droplets become hotter than the sun and emit EUV light. Precision optics from Germany’s Carl Zeiss capture this light and feed it to the machine to print chips.
The most important advance is doubling the number of tin droplets to about 100,000 per second. In addition, the system now uses two smaller laser beams to shape the droplets, instead of one as in current machines. “It’s very challenging, because you need to master many things, many technologies,” says Jorge J. Rocca, a professor at Colorado State University who focuses on laser technologies and has trained several ASML scientists. “What was achieved – one kilowatt – is pretty amazing.”
ASML believes that the techniques for 1000 watts will enable further progress. Purvis sees “a reasonably clear path toward 1,500 watts, and no fundamental reason why we couldn’t get to 2,000 watts.”
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