Without this machine, cutting-edge chips would be impossible to make
Without the EUV machine, Moore’s Law would have died a few years ago”
Each EUV costs roughly $150 million which limits the number of foundries able to afford the machines to the top three (TSMC, Samsung, and Intel). A EUV is not only a huge investment, it is a huge piece of equipment that is approximately as large as a bus and contains 100,000 parts and 2km of cables. The light that emanates from the EUV bounces off several highly polished mirrors to etch features as small as a few atoms in size onto wafers.
The first chips made using the next-gen EUV machine could be produced by Intel. MIT professor Jesús del Alamo calls the new EUV machine an incredible machine. Working on novel transistor architectures, del Alamo says, “It’s an absolutely revolutionary product, a breakthrough that is going to give a new lease of life to the industry for years.”
The U.S. blocked Chinese foundry SMIC from buying a EUV machine
As a backhanded compliment that shows the importance of EUV machines to the production of cutting-edge chips, the U.S. has been trying to block China’s access to the machines. The U.S. has put pressure on the Dutch not to issue any shipping licenses that would allow a EUV machine to be delivered to foundries inside China. And so far, ASML says that it hasn’t shipped a single unit to the country.
Will Hunt, a research analyst at Georgetown University, says, “You can’t make leading-edge chips without ASML’s machines.A lot of it comes down to years and years of tinkering with things and experimenting, and it’s very difficult to get access to that.” Huawei did turn to SMIC to build its Kirin 710A SoC using the 14nm process node. Discussing the EUV machine, Hunt points out that each component used is “astonishingly sophisticated and extraordinarily complex.”
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