The Legacy of ASML: Revolutionizing the Chip Industry with EUV Lithography

Monday - April 1 2024, 15:58 UTC - 7 months ago

ASML, a Dutch company, has revolutionized the chip industry with its development of EUV lithography machines. These tools have allowed chipmakers to continue doubling the amount of components on chips, pushing the progress of the industry forward. ASML's co-president and CTO, Martin van den Brink, has emphasized the company's commitment to meeting the demands of Moore's Law. However, this also means the pressure is on for ASML to stay ahead and continue enabling the progress of the chip industry.

On a drab Monday morning in San Jose, California, at the drab San Jose Convention Center, attendees of the SPIE Advanced Lithography and Patterning Conference filed into the main ballroom until all the seats were taken and the crowd began to line the walls along the back and sides of the room. The convention brings together people who work in the chip industry from all over the world. And on this cool February morning, they had gathered to hear tech industry luminaries extol the late Gordon Moore, Intel’s cofounder and first CEO.

Craig Barrett, also a former CEO of Intel, paid tribute, as did the legendary engineer Burn-Jeng Lin, a pioneer of immersion lithography, a patterning technology that enabled the chip industry to continue moving forward about 20 years ago. Mostly the speeches tended toward reflections on Moore himself—testaments to his genius, accomplishments, and humanity. But the last speaker of the morning, Martin van den Brink, took a different tone, more akin to a victory lap than a eulogy. Van den Brink is the outgoing co-president and CTO of ASML, the Dutch company that makes the machines that in turn let manufacturers produce the most advanced computer chips in the world.

ASML’s technology, he assured the gathering, would be there to meet the demands, thanks to the company’s investment in creating tools capable of making ever finer features: the extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines it rolled out widely in 2017, the high-numerical-aperture (high-NA) EUV machines it is rolling out now, and the hyper-NA EUV machines it has sketched out for the future.

The tribute may have been designed for Gordon Moore, but at the end of van den Brink’s presentation the entire room rose to give him a standing ovation. Because if Gordon Moore deserves credit for creating the law that drove the progress of the industry, as van den Brink says, van den Brink and ASML deserve much of the credit for ensuring that progress remains possible.Yet that also means the pressure is on. ASML has to try and stay ahead of the demands of Moore’s Law.It has to continue making sure chipmakers can keep doubling the amount of rice on the chessboard. Will that be possible? Van den Brink sat down with MIT Technology Review to talk about ASML’s history, its legacy, and what comes next.

ASML is such an undisputed leader in today’s chip ecosystem that it’s hard to believe the company’s market dominance really only dates back to 2017, when its EUV machine, after 17 years of development, upended the conventional process for making chips.

Since the 1960s, photolithography has made it possible to pack computer chips with more and more components. The process involves crafting small circuits by guiding beams of light through a series of mirrors and lenses and then shining that light on a mask, which contains a pattern. Light conveys the chip design, layer by layer, eventually building circuits that form the computational building blocks of everything from smartphones to artificial intelligence.

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Photolithographers have a limited set of tools at their disposal to make smaller designs, and for decades, the type of light used in this process hasn’t changed much. For example, the wavelengths of the light shone onto chips would not be able to create features smaller than the smallest chip features currently available. One option to solve this problem is to use a different type of light, such as extreme ultraviolet (EUV), which has much smaller wavelengths.