内容来源：https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/23/1138837/asml-400-million-dollar-machine-powering-future-of-chipmaking/

内容总结：

台积电的"印钞机"：一台4亿美元的光刻机如何决定AI未来

在人工智能时代，芯片算力需求呈指数级增长，而制造这些芯片的核心设备——极紫外光刻机——正成为全球科技博弈的焦点。荷兰阿斯麦公司垄断着这种价值4亿美元一台的"印钞机"，任何想要制造尖端芯片的企业都无法绕开它。

这台庞然大物如同双层巴士般大小，重达150吨以上，由精密铣削的铝合金制成，布满数千条蜿蜒的管道、彩色电缆和加压储罐。当记者爬上15英尺高的机器顶部时，身着无尘服的技术人员在下方穿梭忙碌。阿斯麦技术执行副总裁乔斯·本肖普表示，这台机器包含超过200立方米的技术设备，其中"包含以原子精度定位镜面的机电装置"。他花了十多年时间与工程师团队共同设计这台设备，有时连他自己看到都会惊叹："我的天哪！"

光刻技术本质上是将电路图案投射到硅晶圆上的工艺，类似于丝网印刷T恤。阿斯麦最新一代高数值孔径极紫外光刻机采用13.5纳米波长的极紫外光，通过每秒数万次向微小熔锡液滴发射激光来产生这种光线。其分辨率达到惊人的8纳米——仅相当于约40个硅原子的宽度。自2019年起，美国施压荷兰政府禁止阿斯麦向中国企业出售高端光刻机，这使得中国半导体产业面临严峻挑战。

然而，这场芯片军备竞赛并未因封锁而停止。中国正投入数十亿美元试图复制阿斯麦的技术，一些初创公司也在另辟蹊径。旧金山初创公司Substrate正研发基于粒子加速器X射线光源的光刻设备，宣称可将每片晶圆成本降至1万美元，仅为行业预期水平的十分之一。挪威公司Lace Lithography则完全放弃使用光线，转而采用氦原子束进行图案转移，精度可达0.1纳米。

但阿斯麦高管对此并不担忧。本肖普表示，目前尚未看到"可行的替代方案"，在制造最先进芯片的大规模生产方面"没有真正的竞争对手"。分析师指出，光刻技术的重大转型历来需要数年甚至数十年时间，阿斯麦近期将继续主导市场。该公司已在研发"超高数值孔径"技术，预计可在七到八年后推向市场，将分辨率进一步提升至6纳米。

随着AI热潮持续升温，芯片需求爆炸式增长。仅2025年，阿斯麦就售出近50台极紫外光刻机，营收近400亿美元，市值超过5000亿美元。无论中美科技竞争如何演变，这台4亿美元的"印钞机"仍将是决定AI算力极限的关键钥匙。正如阿斯麦首席技术官马尔科·彼得斯所言："我们看到的只是冰山一角。"

中文翻译：

这台价值4亿美元的机器，正推动芯片制造的未来。
人工智能时代需要更快、更强大的芯片。而生产这些芯片所需的昂贵精密设备，被荷兰公司ASML垄断。有人能赶上它吗？

乔斯·本肖普正爬上梯子，登上他最新机器的顶端。
这是一段有些费力的路程。这台机器有一辆双层巴士那么大——超过150吨闪闪发光的精密铣削铝材，上面布满数千根蜿蜒的管子、彩色线缆和加压罐。从地面看去，它像一台未来派的V8发动机。当我和本肖普到达顶部时，我们正从大约15英尺的高处往下看，身着兔宝宝服的技术人员在下方忙碌穿梭。

这是一台体积超过200立方米的科技设备——“一种能以原子级精度固定几面镜子的机电装置，”他指着这个巨大的设备说道。本肖普，这位66岁、身材高大、头发花白的工程师，与他的团队花了十多年时间设计这台机器，但即便如此，他有时看着它也会感叹：“我的天哪。”

本肖普是ASML的技术执行副总裁。这家荷兰公司是微芯片行业的关键一环。如果你想制造用于手机或人工智能的强力芯片，就需要像我们脚下这台这样的光刻机，来制造越来越微小的电路。光刻是一门艺术和科学，通过将光线照射到硅晶圆上，刻画出晶体管、导线和其他微芯片组件的图形，这些芯片最终将从晶圆上切割下来。

芯片制造领域基本上被两大玩家控制：制造光刻机的ASML，以及芯片制造巨头台积电。

九年前，ASML开始销售采用大胆新方法刻画芯片特征的光刻机。这些机器使用极紫外线——一种远超出可见光谱的辐射，通过每秒数万次向微小的熔化锡滴发射激光来产生。第一批机器——一项历时16年、耗资约100亿美元的研发登月计划的成果——可以制造分辨率为13纳米的晶体管特征。而这款新机器能做得更好：它的分辨率仅为8纳米，大约是40个硅原子的宽度。这些设备现在正以令人瞠目的价格（每台4亿美元）运往芯片制造厂。

但芯片制造商们愿意掏这笔钱，因为他们正拼命争取每年生产出更新、更好的芯片。这意味着他们需要能得到能制造更小组件、并将它们更密集地挤在一起的机器——这是制造更快、更节能芯片的长期秘诀。

多年来，ASML的工具一直是维持摩尔定律生命力的关键。没有这家公司的先进芯片制造技术，芯片密度——以及执行更多计算的能力——很可能早已停滞不前。

人工智能行业对更密集芯片产生了新的、贪婪的需求，因为像OpenAI和Anthropic这样的公司正争先恐后地建设服务器农场，以训练和部署越来越强大的新模型，而这些模型需要越来越强大的新硬件。ASML的最新机器有望让这场AI盛宴至少再持续十年。

“我们可以让客户实现越来越小的特征，这为我们今天在AI领域看到的、令人叹为观止的一切打开了空间，”ASML首席技术官马可·彼得斯告诉我。“我认为我们才刚看到冰山一角。”

ASML对“缩小”（芯片行业的叫法）的不懈追求，使其成为一股主导力量：该公司生产全球约90%的芯片光刻工具。如果你制造芯片，就绕不开ASML。

但这种垄断地位让一些人和政府感到不安。芯片制造领域基本上只有两大玩家：制造光刻机的ASML，以及位于台湾的芯片制造巨头台积电。台积电使用ASML的机器制造绝大多数微芯片。这种双头垄断如此强大，以至于产生了地缘政治影响。为了阻止中国发展先进人工智能，美国政府于2019年施压荷兰政府实施禁运：ASML不得向任何中国公司出售高端机器。在地缘政治上，“芯片就是新的石油，”《焦点：ASML之道》一书的作者马克·海金克说。被剥夺芯片可能与被剥夺石油一样灾难性。而在这个比喻中，你可以说ASML就是霍尔木兹海峡。

光刻初创公司Substrate的联合创始人兼CEO詹姆斯·普劳德表示，这种局面并不理想。Substrate在其网站上称，美国“危险地依赖”一条海外且日益昂贵的供应链。“少数玩家占据了巨大的集中度，”普劳德说。“而且供应链非常昂贵。”

正因如此，在ASML主导市场20年后，潜在的竞争者现在正瞄准它的地盘。中国正渴望地投入数十亿美元试图复制ASML的技术。像Substrate这样的初创公司也试图加入战局，将目标锁定在制造比ASML的庞然大物更便宜、更小、甚至功能更强的光刻机上。它们中会有成功的吗？短期内显然属于ASML，但正如其工程师所知，只要用对光线的把戏，就能撼动一个巨人。

奇怪的是，制造芯片有点像用丝网印刷T恤。要在硅晶圆上印出图形，你先要在掩模版上有一个图形——一个承载设计的掩模。将光线照射到掩模版上，就能将图形转移到晶圆上。光线与晶圆上的一层化学物质相互作用，将图形固定下来。

芯片特征的大小部分取决于机器使用的光的波长：波长越小，你能制造的电路就越微小。你可以在一定程度上扩展波长的能力；增加所谓数值孔径，通常意味着换用更大的镜头，可以进一步聚焦光线，从而为越来越小的组件绘制图形。但最终，这一招会达到极限，你需要找到一种波长更小的新光源。

所以芯片制造的历史就像一支两步舞。行业找到一种好的光源，然后增加数值孔径，最终不得不接受需要更短波长，从而重新开始两步舞。直到20世纪90年代初，芯片制造商使用可见光，波长约400纳米。到90年代中期，他们升级到深紫外线，最终将波长降至193纳米。到90年代末，他们看到深紫外线的路快走到头了。但接下来用什么？

所有选项都很麻烦。他们可以改用X射线，波长极短，仅一纳米，但极难聚焦。电子束和离子束同样精确；但它们像点阵打印机一样工作，逐点转移图形，速度太慢。（芯片行业希望机器每小时能处理数百片晶圆。）

“这是一家非常注重工程的公司：‘派几千名工程师去，让他们把这些难题碾碎。’他们就是这么做的，而且成功了。”
——杰夫·科赫，SemiAnalysis分析师

大约2001年，当时在光刻领域规模较小的ASML押注了另一个选项：极紫外线，波长略短于X射线范围。尼康和佳能也在研究，但它们退出了——而ASML坚持了下来。这个想法充满了未知数。没人知道如何可靠地产生那种光，也不知道如何聚焦它；极紫外线会被普通玻璃透镜吸收，甚至会被空气吸收。ASML预计需要整整六年才能攻克这个研发噩梦。

实际上，它花了16年和大约100亿美元的研究经费，但成功了。这台在真空中工作的机器，通过汽化熔化的锡并使用镜子引导来产生极紫外线光。历史悠久的德国光学公司蔡司不得不发明新的抛光与检测镜片的技术，使用离子束来敲掉微小的瑕疵。

“他们有点忽略了那些‘嘿，这永远不会成功’的噪音，只是埋头解决这些巨大的工程难题，”曾在ASML工作、现为芯片行业研究公司SemiAnalysis分析师的杰夫·科赫说。“这是一家非常注重工程的公司：‘派几千名工程师去，让他们把这些难题碾碎。’他们就是这么做的，而且成功了。”

当第一批极紫外线机器于2017年上市时，每台售价超过1亿美元。一些观察者质疑主要的芯片制造公司——台积电、三星和英特尔——是否真的会有需求。在芯片制造商等待极紫外线技术多年期间，光刻行业已经开发出改进传统深紫外线的巧妙方法。（例如，如果在晶圆上放一层水，光线可以更窄地聚焦。）也许极紫外线在一段时间内不会被大量需要？

但ASML运气很好。极紫外线问世仅几年后，OpenAI发布了GPT-3，然后是ChatGPT。人工智能突然成为主流。像OpenAI、谷歌、Meta和Anthropic等公司立即渴望获得越来越高端芯片，因为他们建造了庞大的服务器群来训练和部署大型语言模型。极紫外线使得制造针对AI定制的芯片设计变得更容易、更快。英伟达开始生产精英级GPU——非常适合AI训练的处理器——每个售价4万美元；大公司们趋之若鹜。AI战争开始了，极紫外线需求旺盛。ASML表示，2025年它向公司出售了近50台极紫外线机器，收入近400亿美元。截至发稿时，该公司市值超过5000亿美元。

ASML的新机器不乏潜在客户。但有一个财力雄厚的客户，无论出多少钱都买不到：中国。

美国希望削弱中国制造尖端AI芯片——或任何先进芯片——的能力。因此，当ASML于2017年开始销售其最初的极紫外线机器时，特朗普政府成功施压荷兰政府，禁止该公司向任何中国公司销售这些机器。美国还对中国电信巨头华为实施了出口管制，禁止美国公司使用其4G和5G设备。

这一记组合拳激怒了中国政府并促使其采取行动。中国现在正投入数十亿美元追赶，试图开发自己的极紫外线芯片图形化技术。路透社去年冬天的一篇报道发现，一个雇佣了前ASML员工的政府秘密项目，拼凑出了一台巨大到填满整个实验室楼层的机器。目前尚不清楚它的性能如何。海金克说，这个实验很可能正在制造一些芯片，但他怀疑能否达到工业规模。

政府官方否认在推动极紫外线技术的发展。与政府关系密切的《环球时报》的一篇社论对这篇报道不以为然，声称中国仍乐于与西方合作以获取芯片。该社论称：“我们的目标从来不是孤立地建造一个自给自足的‘技术孤岛’，而是在实现关键技术自主可控的基础上，更深入、更平等地融入全球创新网络。”

专家表示，现实情况介于两者之间。中国确实渴望拥有国内制造高端芯片的能力。而且，与ASML不同，它不需要其极紫外线设备高效且盈利，每小时处理约200片晶圆。任何产出都有助于减少其对西方的依赖。

“他们会非常乐意拥有一台每小时只处理一片晶圆、运行起来成本高昂的工具，”科赫说。“他们会建一个有一千台这种工具的晶圆厂，并且会非常满意。”

尽管如此，有人告诉我，良好地产生和管理极紫外线光是一项可能需要数年的壮举。与此同时，专注于安全与技术的智库“特殊竞争研究项目”的技术领导力高级顾问大卫·林表示，中国将大力依赖90年代开发的深紫外光刻技术，充分利用一种称为多重图形的替代但较慢的方法。“他们会将DUV推向极限，”林说。

AI竞赛也促使中国设计出越来越巧妙的方法来开发不依赖最快AI芯片的大型语言模型。在美国，OpenAI、Anthropic和谷歌正在争夺谁能为数量最多的英伟达热门芯片买单。由于中国无法以这种方式竞争，它在软件而非硬件上进行创新——构建像DeepSeek这样的更轻量级的大型语言模型。

随着中国行动起来，ASML仍然专注于“缩小”这个目标。为了做到更小，本肖普和他的工程师决定，他们不会改用新型光源。他们将进行两步舞的第二步：将机器的数值孔径提高一半以上（对于关注具体数字的人，NA将从0.33变为0.55）。这将使他们能够将晶体管尺寸缩小近一半，并使芯片上的密度增加近三倍。

这也将是一个更容易的攀登。由于无需开发全新的光源，基于高数值孔径极紫外线的新机器将是渐进式的，而非革命性的。

尽管如此，构建新系统确实带来了一些棘手的挑战。在极紫外线机器中，将图像转移到晶圆上的方法是，将光线照射到掩模版上的微芯片图形，然后使用光学系统接收反射光，并将该图形缩小到你想要的晶圆尺寸。光线在任何给定时刻只照射到掩模版的一部分，因此你快速来回移动掩模版，使图形的每个部分都暴露在光线下。

采用更高的数值孔径意味着他们可以在掩模版上拥有更小的特征。但这也意味着一些光线将以更陡的角度到达掩模版——并反射出来。

这就带来了问题。掩模版上的图形是三维的，因此以如此陡的角度到达的光线会产生阴影——就像倾斜的阳光在大峡谷中制造阴影一样。这可能会削弱机器制造清晰图形的能力。

新的掩模版以高达22 g的加速度移动，比该公司最初的极紫外线机器快得多。“别试图坐在上面，因为你会昏过去的，”彼得斯告诉我。晶圆台也随之更快地移动，与掩模版同步。

与此同时，在德国，蔡司的工程师们正忙着设计镜子，以适应更高的数值孔径和光的非对称整形。新镜子的大小大约是标准极紫外线机器的两倍，而负责将光线从掩模版传输到晶圆的投影系统重达整整12吨，是以前的七倍。蔡司建立了一条新的机器人辅助生产线来处理这些笨重的新巨兽。该公司称，它们是有史以来制造的最光滑表面。

与此同时，ASML正在努力使其极紫外线光源更加强大，以帮助加快晶圆曝光过程。工程师们计算，如果他们用激光击中每个锡滴三次，而不是像第一台机器那样两次，他们可以提高极紫外线的输出。这意味着已经非常繁忙的锡喷射系统需要加速50%。“激光器越来越大，”负责在圣地亚哥建造极紫外线光源的ASML工程负责人亚历克斯·沙夫甘斯说。

事实上，单台机器的激光器现在就占据了一整个房间。本肖普向我展示完巨大的高NA设备后，我们穿过大厅，进入一个充满巨大六英尺高箱体的房间，这些箱体是激光系统的一部分。透过设备侧面小小的窗口，我们看到了用于产生激光的发光紫色等离子体。

当高NA机器开始下线时，一家公司正渴望地等待着：英特尔。该公司购买了第一台出售的高NA机器，2024年春天，300名ASML工程师出现在俄勒冈州英特尔的一个晶圆厂，开始组装和测试它。

“ASML实际上在一个箱子上系了一个巨大的丝带，”英特尔研究员、硬件与光刻解决方案总监马克·菲利普斯笑着说。他的团队一直在测试这台机器，看它的性能如何；菲利普斯不愿透露细节，只表示他对“工具的快速健康进展非常满意”。他也不愿给出英特尔何时开始用它制造芯片的日期，尽管观察者表示这很可能发生在明年。该公司计划逐步引入，先用于芯片上的几个精密元件，然后逐渐用于更多元件。

赌注是重拾昔日辉煌的机会。英特尔曾是硅谷的巨头，设计用于计算机和服务器的最先进CPU，并在自己的晶圆厂中制造它们。但在2010年代，大的新市场是手机芯片和用于AI及游戏的GPU，英特尔迅速失势。苹果设计了自己的移动芯片（并让台积电制造），英伟达在GPU方面也如法炮制。谷歌于2015年开始推出自己设计的、由台积电制造的AI芯片TPU，并很快用它们填满了数据中心。

因此，英特尔在2021年宣布了一个登月计划。它将积极建设代工业务，与台积电正面竞争。英特尔代工厂将不制造英特尔芯片，而是为手机和AI芯片制造商等客户制造设计。

英特尔希望，率先使用高NA技术将使其在硅竞赛中占据优势，使其能够比任何人都更快地打印出微小图形。

它也可能让客户的事情变得更简单。多年来，在等待极紫外线机器问世的同时，芯片设计师使用多重图形技术从旧形式的光线中榨取更多寿命。每个芯片都是由层构成的，这些层被沉积下来，形成诸如开关和布线之类的组件。如果你在处理其中一层，并且需要制造比机器通常能生产的更小的特征，你可以将该层的图形分解成几个图形，然后一次一个地将晶圆暴露在它们面前。这种策略帮助芯片制造商继续使用较旧（且更便宜）的机器，同时还能制造出越来越小的组件。但多重图形是一个麻烦：设计复杂的重叠图形更具挑战性，打印每个芯片也慢得多。如果你知道可以进行“单次图形化”，一次性完成每一层的曝光，那么设计芯片就容易得多。

观察者表示，要建立一个能在台积电和三星的主场击败它们的代工业务并非易事。“弯道超车很困难，”海金克说。但同样真实的是，高科技世界对更好芯片的贪婪需求如此之大，以至于英特尔可能成功，仅仅因为即使是台积电和三星也无法满足所有需求。

“存在溢出需求，所以英特尔可以靠这个生存，”科赫说。“现在甚至不是残羹剩饭了。那是一顿大餐。它可能不是最好的代工厂，但他们能制造芯片，而只有三家公司能做到这一点，对吧？”

至于台积电，它在高NA方面似乎正在等待时机。“台积电将在高NA极紫外线技术成熟并准备好为我们的客户带来最大利益时部署它，”该公司在给《麻省理工科技评论》的书面回应中写道。一些人怀疑它直到2030年代才会大量使用这些机器。部分原因是成本：台积电专注于尽可能经济高效地生产芯片，而高NA工具每台售价高达4亿美元，远高于之前的极紫外线设备。而且与那些设备不同，新机器并非革命性的飞跃。

“这大约是在能力上提高30%到50%，”分析师兼前ASML员工科赫说。“这可能是第一个对ASML来说没有立刻产生明显商业意义的工具。”

科赫说，这并不是说行业最终不会全面拥抱高NA。大多数公司如果想继续做小，就需要它。但台积电更可能尽可能使用其现有的极紫外线工具向前推进，使用繁琐的多重图形技术从其那一代产品中榨取尽可能多的价值，直到绝对需要转换为止。

“行业只有在绝对无法再从其当前做法中再榨取哪怕一点点价值时，才会转变范式，”科赫说。

中国并不是唯一一个寻求打破当前权力平衡的力量。ASML的主导地位及其工具不断飙升的成本，也催生了其他新贵。但他们没有试图复制ASML在极紫外线方面的突破，而是另辟蹊径——致力于使用完全不同形式的光线的光刻工具。他们承诺，这些工具将便宜得多，而且同样强大。

其中之一是Substrate，一家总部位于旧金山的初创公司。成立于四年前，它正在研发一种使用粒子加速器产生的X射线的工具。X射线具有非常短的波长，使其成为制造微小特征的潜在强大方式。

粒子加速器历来体积庞大，使其难以融入芯片制造过程。Substrate表示，它利用了几十年来粒子加速方面的科学改进，生产了一种更小、适合大规模生产的光源。

去年，该公司发布了图像，显示它已经制造出精细的图形，CEO普劳德说，这些图形目前只有使用高NA极紫外线机器才能实现。他说Substrate的目标是到2030年实现芯片的大规模生产。

但普劳德不打算将工具卖给台积电或英特尔。事实上，他不打算卖给任何人。相反，Substrate想建立自己的晶圆厂，使用自己的工具制造芯片。

“我们将需要的芯片数量，将比你现有的最疯狂预测还要高出好几个数量级。”
——詹姆斯·普劳德，Substrate联合创始人兼CEO

普劳德认为，半导体行业需要新方法，因为它已经变得过于昂贵和集中。该公司指出，如今建一个晶圆厂的成本可能高达250亿美元，而2010年代约为50亿美元。普劳德说，这正将一片装满先进芯片的晶圆的成本推高至10万美元。

“我认为，这是一个令人望而却步的成本，”他说。供应链中的产能也不足：“对于当前需求的增长来说，它相对缓慢且难以灵活应对。”他钦佩ASML的极紫外线工具——它是“该技术的最高典范”——但需要新方法。

部分原因是出于国家安全考虑。普劳德和他的团队认为，美国依赖外国供应太危险了。但他也预测，当前的AI热潮将进入超速发展，产生巨大的芯片需求，而现有的ASML/台积电双头垄断将无法满足：“我们将需要的芯片数量，将比你现有的最疯狂预测还要高出好几个数量级。”

Substrate预测，它能够以每片1万美元的价格生产成品晶圆——是普劳德预测的行业其他公司成本走向的十分之一。普劳德说，部分原因是该公司的系统将是垂直整合的，因此它将控制芯片制造过程的所有部分，但也因为其光刻工具将不那么复杂：“我们能够以更简单的封装方式组合起来。”

尽管如此，Substrate对自己的计划守口如瓶。与ASML不同，该公司没有提供关于它如何产生光线，或者如何将其转化为在晶圆上制造图形的具体细节。

Substrate的雄心让一些行业观察者感到担忧。海金克认为，同时掌握新型光刻技术和高通量晶圆厂技术可能“无法实现且不可能”，他将公司的保密视为一个危险信号。“这个行业是关于开放的创新，”他说。

科赫对其雄心和融资更为印象深刻。它正在追求的那种技术“真的很酷，”他说。“很有趣。”但“从实验室规模的演示到高产量之间还有很长的路要走，”他补充道。“这更像是ASML即将面临的颠覆吗？可能不是。”

另一家目标与Substrate大致相同时期进入市场的初创公司是Lace Lithography。总部位于挪威，它正在设计一种完全不同的方法——一种根本不使用光的方法。相反，一束高能的氦原子被指向掩模版上的图形。当氦原子随后击中晶圆时，原子将其能量转移给晶圆，将设计赋予芯片。

这个想法由来已久。CEO博迪尔·霍尔斯特在2008年接手了它，当时她是一名研究原子束使用的物理学家。利用X射线进行光刻的先驱、麻省理工学院教授亨利·“汉克”·史密斯告诉她，她应该探索使用原子作为制造微芯片的机制，因为当时他不确定ASML的极紫外线登月计划能否成功。“即使它成功了，我们最终也需要原子，”他告诉她。

霍尔斯特进行了一些实验以进一步探索这个想法，并与一位前博士生——物理学家和机器学习专家阿德里亚·萨尔瓦多·帕劳——合作创立了Lace。与Substrate的一样，它的工具与ASML的巨大机器完全不同。激发态原子的来源“看起来有点像火箭发动机，”帕劳说。“非常酷。”极紫外线的波长是13.5纳米，而氦原子提供的精度为0.1纳米。该过程所需的功率也少得多，并且机器的设计目标是小得多。霍尔斯特告诉我，该公司目标是在2029或2030年之前准备好向晶圆厂销售机器。

“我认为每个人都非常期待出现能延伸超越光线、超越极紫外线的路线图的东西，”帕劳说。

ASML带着好奇心观察着这些新贵。本肖普说，他无法评估Substrate的技术能否可靠且经济地工作，因为该公司没有解释其任何工艺。但他参加了一个会议，霍尔斯特和帕劳在会上做了介绍Lace Lithography技术的演讲。

“我对他们做这件事的方式印象深刻，”他说。问题是，他认为该工艺在晶圆上制造的图形深度不够，无法实用。“我看不出他们如何将其扩展成一个可行的量产产品，”他告诉我。

他怀疑ASML对极紫外线的掌握将使其在近期内保持领先地位。“到目前为止，我还没有看到一个可行的替代方案，”他说。他认为，在最先进芯片代际的大规模制造方面，“没有严肃的竞争者”。

塔夫茨大学国际历史教授、《芯片战争》一书的作者克里斯·米勒表示，确实，芯片制造的重大转变是缓慢的。“毫无疑问，我们最终会有（极紫外线的）替代品，”他通过电子邮件告诉我。“但值得注意的是，光刻技术的转变历史上需要数年，甚至数十年。”

ASML的高管们也在思考他们的未来。本肖普预计高NA技术将在2030年代主导芯片制造。在那之后呢？事实上，行业倾向于每十年转向一种新的光形式。

“你可能会说，是时候进入下一个十年了，”在我们脱下兔宝宝服、他喝着咖啡放松时，他告诉我。

但ASML的高管们怀疑，他们可以通过进一步提高现有机器的数值孔径，从极紫外线中挤出更多能力。他们已经在尝试一种将NA从0.55提高到0.75的设计：“超级NA”。它可能让他们以6纳米的分辨率在晶圆上刻画图形。他们还在努力将各种光学元件标准化为一个统一大小的平台，这样客户可以订购一台机器，配备标准极紫外线、高NA或超级NA中的任何一种。如果都在相同大小的单元中，将简化将每种技术集成到晶圆厂中的成本和物流。本肖普认为，如果公司继续推进，超级NA工具可能会在七八年后上市，并在2030年代下半叶开始大量销售。

目前，主动权在ASML手中。“我们正在挑战物理学的极限，”彼得斯告诉我。现在的问题是，是否有其他人能做出更大的努力。

克莱夫·汤普森是一位驻纽约市的科学与技术记者。他曾在《麻省理工科技评论》2021年计算特刊上撰文介绍ASML最初极紫外线机器的开发过程。

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英文来源：

The $400 million machine powering the future of chipmaking
The AI era needs ever faster chips. ASML has a monopoly on the expensive contraptions needed to pattern them. Can anyone catch up?
Jos Benschop is climbing a ladder to get to the top of his newest machine.
It’s a bit of a schlep. The contraption is the size of a double-decker bus—more than 150 tons of gleaming precision-milled aluminum covered in thousands of snaking tubes, colored cables, and pressurized tanks. From the ground, it looks like a futuristic V8 engine. When I reach the top with Benschop we’re looking down from about 15 feet in the air, with bunny-suited technicians scurrying around below.
It’s more than 200 cubic meters of tech—“mechatronic devices that hold a few mirrors in a position with atomic precision,” he says, gesturing at the gargantuan apparatus. Benschop, a tall and grizzled 66-year-old, has spent over a decade working with his engineers to design this thing, but even so, he’ll sometimes look at it and go: Oh my God.
Benschop is the executive vice president of technology for ASML, a Dutch company that is the linchpin of the microchip industry. If you want to make powerful chips to power phones or AI, a lithography machine like the one we’re standing on is what you need to create increasingly tiny circuitry. Lithography is the art and science of shining light on a silicon wafer to pattern out the transistors, wiring, and other components of the microchips that will be cut from it.
The chipmaking field is essentially controlled by only two big players: ASML, which creates the lithography machines, and TSMC, the chipmaking giant.
Nine years ago, ASML began selling machines that use a daring new way of patterning chip features. These machines employ extreme-ultraviolet light, or EUV—radiation well outside the visible spectrum that they produce by shooting lasers at tiny molten drops of tin, tens of thousands of times a second. Those first machines—the result of an R&D moonshot that lasted 16 years and cost about $10 billion—can craft transistor features with a resolution of 13 nanometers. This new machine can do even better: It has a resolution of just eight nanometers, the width of about 40 silicon atoms. The devices are now shipping to chipmaking factories, or fabs, at an eye-watering price: $400 million each.
But chipmakers will fork that cash over, because they are in a desperate race to produce new and improved chips every year. That means getting their mitts on machines that can make ever smaller components and cram them together ever more densely—part of a long-standing recipe for creating faster and more energy-efficient chips.
For years now, ASML’s tools have been critical to keeping Moore’s Law alive. Without the company’s advanced chipmaking technology it is very possible that chip density—and the ability to perform ever more calculations—would have plateaued.
The AI industry has produced new and ravenous demand for denser chips, as firms like OpenAI and Anthropic scramble to erect server farms that train and deploy new, ever-more-powerful models, which require new, ever-more-powerful hardware. ASML’s latest machine promises to help keep the AI party raging for at least another decade.
“We can allow customers to go to smaller and smaller features, and that opens up the space for whatever we see now today in AI, which is absolutely mind-blowing,” Marco Pieters, ASML’s CTO, told me. “I think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.”
Its relentless push for “shrink”—as they call it in the chipmaking industry—has made ASML a dominant force: The company produces about 90% of all chip-lithography tools worldwide. If you make chips, ASML is unavoidable.
But that monopoly position makes some people, and governments, uneasy. The chipmaking field is essentially controlled by only two big players: ASML, which creates the lithography machines, and TSMC, the chipmaking giant in Taiwan, which uses ASML’s machines to craft the vast majority of all microchips. This duopoly is so powerful that it has geopolitical implications. In an effort to prevent China from developing advanced AI, the US government pressured the Dutch government to impose an embargo in 2019: ASML isn’t allowed to sell high-end machines to any Chinese firm. Geopolitically, “chips are the new oil,” says Marc Hijink, the author of Focus: The ASML Way. Being deprived of them can be as disastrous as being deprived of oil. And in that metaphor, you might say, ASML is the Strait of Hormuz.
James Proud, the cofounder and CEO of the lithography startup Substrate, says the situation is not ideal. The US is “dangerously reliant” on a supply chain that’s overseas and increasingly pricey, Substrate says on its website. “There’s a huge concentration in a small number of players,” Proud says. “And the supply chain is just very expensive.”
Which is why, after two decades of ASML’s dominance, would-be competitors are now gunning for its territory. China is hungrily pouring billions into trying to replicate ASML’s tech. And startups like Substrate are trying to get in the game as well, setting their sights on creating lithography machines that are cheaper, smaller, and even more capable than ASML’s behemoths. Will any of them succeed? The near future clearly belongs to ASML, but as its engineers well know, you can unseat a giant with the right trick of the light.
Making chips is, oddly, a bit like silk-screening a T-shirt. To print a pattern on a silicon wafer, you start with a pattern on a reticle—a mask that carries the design. Shining a light on the reticle transfers that pattern to the wafer. The light interacts with a layer of chemicals on the wafer, fixing the pattern in place.
The size of a chip’s features is partly set by the wavelength of light the machine uses: The smaller the wavelength, the teensier the circuitry you can create. You can stretch the capabilities of a wavelength somewhat; increasing what’s known as the numerical aperture, which usually means swapping in a bigger lens, can further focus the light and thus lay down patterns for smaller and smaller components. Eventually, though, this trick hits its limit, and you need to find a new form of light with a smaller wavelength.
So the history of chipmaking has been a two-step dance. The industry finds a good source of light, eventually increases the numerical aperture, and then finally accepts the need for a smaller wavelength, starting the two-step all over again. Up to the early 1990s, chipmakers used visible light, with a wavelength of about 400 nanometers. By the mid-’90s they’d upgraded to deep ultraviolet, ultimately getting it down to a 193-nanometer wavelength. By the late ’90s they saw the end of the line approaching for deep ultraviolet. But what would come next?
All the options were troublesome. They could shift to x-rays, with a teensy one-nanometer wavelength, but they were devilishly hard to focus. Beams of electrons and ions were equally precise; but they worked like dot-matrix printers, transferring a pattern point by point, which was far too slow. (The chip industry wants a machine to crank out hundreds of wafers per hour.)
“It’s a very engineering-heavy company: Let’s send thousands of engineers and just have them mow down these problems. That’s what they did, and it worked.”
Jeff Koch, analyst, SemiAnalysis
Around 2001, ASML, then a smaller player in the lithography world, placed its bet on another option: EUV, with a wavelength just shy of the x-ray range. Nikon and Canon were working on it as well, but they dropped out—while ASML kept going. The idea was full of unknowns. Nobody knew how to reliably generate that type of light, nor how to focus it; EUV is absorbed by regular glass lenses. It’s even absorbed by air. ASML figured it would take six full years to wade through this R&D nightmare.
In reality it took those 16 years and about $10 billion in research, but it worked. The machine, which works in a vacuum, creates EUV light by vaporizing molten tin and using mirrors to direct it. Zeiss, a historic German optics company, had to invent new techniques for polishing and inspecting the mirrors, using an ion beam to knock off minute imperfections.
“They sort of ignored the buzz of, like, Hey, this is never gonna work, and they just beat their heads against these huge engineering problems,” says Jeff Koch, who used to work for ASML and is now an analyst for the chip-industry research firm SemiAnalysis. “It’s a very engineering-heavy company: Let’s send thousands of engineers and just have them mow down these problems. That’s what they did, and it worked.”
When the first EUV machines went on the market in 2017, they cost well over $100 million apiece. Some observers wondered whether the demand would really be there from the major chipmaking firms—TSMC, Samsung, and Intel. In the years chipmakers were waiting for EUV to happen, the lithography industry had developed clever ways to improve on old-fashioned deep ultraviolet light. (If you put a layer of water on top of the wafer, for example, the light could focus more narrowly.) Maybe EUV wouldn’t be much needed for a while?
But ASML lucked out. Only a few years after EUV debuted, OpenAI released GPT-3 and then ChatGPT. Artificial intelligence burst into the mainstream. Instantly, firms like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic were hungry for increasingly high-end chips as they built massive server farms to train and deploy large language models. EUV made it easier and faster to crank out AI-tailored chip designs. Nvidia began producing elite GPUs—processors perfectly suited for AI training—that cost $40,000 a pop; the big companies couldn’t get enough. The AI wars were on, and EUV was in demand. In 2025, ASML says, it sold nearly 50 EUV machines to companies and pulled in nearly $40 billion in revenue. As of press time, the company’s market cap was over half a trillion dollars.
ASML’s new machines have no shortage of potential customers. But there is one in particular, with deep pockets, that can’t buy them for any amount of money: China.
The US wants to hobble China’s ability to create cutting-edge AI chips—or any advanced chips, for that matter. So when ASML began selling its original EUV machines, in 2017, the Trump administration successfully pressured the Dutch government to forbid the company from selling them to any Chinese firms. The US had also imposed export controls on China’s telecom giant Huawei, banning US firms from using its 4G and 5G equipment.
This one-two punch incensed the Chinese government and stirred it to action. China is now pouring billions into catching up and trying to develop its own EUV chip-patterning technology. A Reuters report last winter found that a government skunkworks employing former ASML staffers had cobbled together a machine so huge it filled the entire floor of a lab. It’s unclear how well it works. The experiment may well be making some chips, says Hijink, but he doubts it can do so at an industrial scale.
Officially, the government denied it was pushing to develop EUV tech. An editorial in the Global Times—a newspaper closely allied with the Chinese government—pooh-poohed the report, claiming that China was still happy to work with the West to get access to chips. “Our goal has never been to build a self-sufficient ‘technology island’ in isolation,” it stated, “but rather, on the basis of achieving autonomy and control over key technologies, to integrate more deeply and equally into the global innovation network.”
Experts say the reality is in the middle. China definitely craves a domestic ability to make high-end chips. And unlike ASML, it doesn’t need its EUV machinery to be efficient and profitable, cranking out about 200 wafers an hour. Any output would help wean it off reliance on the West.
“They would be very happy to have a tool that does one wafer per hour and it costs them a fortune to run,” Koch says. “They would build a fab with a thousand of those and be super happy with it.”
Still, producing and managing EUV light well is a feat that might take years, some told me. In the meantime, the Chinese will lean hard on deep-ultraviolet lithography, developed in the ’90s, making the most of an alternative but slower approach known as multi-patterning, says David Lin, senior advisor for tech leadership at the Special Competitive Studies Project, a think tank that focuses on security and technology. “They’re going to push DUV to the absolute limits,” Lin says.
The AI race is also pushing China to devise ever cleverer ways of developing LLMs that don’t rely on the fastest AI chips. In the US, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are fighting over who can buy the biggest piles of hot Nvidia chips. Since China can’t compete that way, it is innovating not in hardware but in software—building lighter-weight LLMs like DeepSeek.
As China rumbles into action, ASML has remained laser focused on shrink. To go even smaller, Benschop and his engineers decided, they wouldn’t shift to a new form of light. They’d do the second part of the two-step: They’d raise the numerical aperture of the machine by more than half (for those keeping track of the specific numbers, it would be a switch from an NA of 0.33 to an NA of 0.55). That would let them cut the size of the transistors by close to half and nearly triple their density on a chip.
This would also be an easier climb. Without the need to develop an entirely new source of light, the new machine—based on high-numerical-aperture EUV, or “high NA”—would be evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Still, building the new system did present a few gnarly challenges. In an EUV machine, the way you transfer an image onto a wafer is by shining light at the microchip pattern on the reticle and then using an optical system to take the reflected light and demagnify that pattern, shrinking it down to the size you want on the wafer. The light hits only part of the reticle at any given time, so you quickly move the reticle back and forth to expose every part of the pattern to the light.
Going to a higher numerical aperture meant they could have smaller features on the reticle. But this also meant that some of the light would be arriving at the reticle—and reflecting off it—at a steeper angle.
That’s what caused problems. The pattern on the reticle is three-dimensional, so light arriving at such a steep angle caused shadows—much the way slanted sunlight creates shadows in the Grand Canyon. That stood to diminish the machine’s ability to make clear patterns.
The new reticle moves with acceleration up to 22 g, much faster than in the company’s original EUV machine. “Don’t try to sit on it, because you’ll pass out.”
The solution was to change the pattern on the reticle—along with the way the mirrors took the light and shrank it down to impart the pattern to the wafer. The designs on the reticle would now be twice as long as they were wide—stretched, as it were, in one dimension.
But this design came with its own problems. The changes to the mirrors meant the area on the wafer exposed during a single scan was half the size it was with the original EUV machines, reducing the system’s speed. And ASML couldn’t tolerate any slowdown: Chipmakers were paying it for machines with massive throughput, about 200 wafers an hour.
If one part of the system slowed down, another part would have to speed up. The engineers decided the machine should move the reticle faster, which meant making the entire mechanism lighter and dramatically redesigning it. The new reticle moves with acceleration up to 22 g, much faster than in the company’s original EUV machine. “Don’t try to sit on it, because you’ll pass out,” Pieters told me. The wafer stage moves around faster as well, in tandem with the reticle.
Meanwhile, over in Germany, Zeiss’s engineers were busy designing mirrors to accommodate the higher numerical aperture and asymmetric shaping of the light. The new mirrors would be about twice as large as those in the regular EUV machines, and the projection system, which carries light from the reticle to the wafer, weighed fully 12 tons, seven times more than before. Zeiss built a new robot-assisted production line to handle these ponderous new beasts. The company says they’re the smoothest surfaces they’ve ever made.
At the same time, ASML was working on making its EUV light source even more powerful, to help make the wafer-exposing process go faster. The engineers calculated that they could improve the output of EUV if they hit each tin droplet three times with the laser instead of twice, as they do in the first machine. That meant the already-hectic system of firing tin would need to speed up by 50%. “The lasers just keep getting bigger,” says Alex Schafgans, the head of engineering at ASML in San Diego, where the EUV light source is built.
Indeed, the lasers for a single machine now fill an entire room. After Benschop showed me the massive high-NA device, we walked across the hall and entered a chamber filled with hulking six-foot-tall boxes that were part of the laser system. Peering through tiny windows in the sides of the units, we could see the glowing purple plasma used in creating the laser light.
When high-NA machines began to roll off the assembly line, one company was waiting hungrily: Intel. The company purchased the very first high-NA machine put up for sale, and in the spring of 2024, 300 ASML engineers showed up in Oregon at one of Intel’s fabs to begin assembling and testing it.
“ASML actually put a giant ribbon around one of the boxes,” says Mark Phillips, an Intel fellow who is director of its hardware and lithography solutions, laughing. His team has been testing the machine to see how well it performs; Phillips wouldn’t give details other than to say he’s “very pleased at the rapid pace of tool health.” He also wouldn’t give a date for when Intel would start using it to make chips, though observers say that will likely happen next year. The company plans to ease it in, using it for just a few precision components on a chip and then gradually for more and more.
What’s at stake is a chance to recapture its mojo. Intel was once a silicon powerhouse, designing the most cutting-edge CPUs for computers and servers, and building them in its own fabs. But in the 2010s, the big new markets were mobile-phone chips and GPUs for AI and gaming, and Intel rapidly lost ground. Apple designed its own mobile chips (and had TSMC make them), while Nvidia did the same thing with GPUs. Google began banging out its own TSMC-made AI chips called TPUs in 2015, and soon it was stuffing data centers full of them.
So in 2021 Intel announced a moonshot. It would aggressively begin building out a foundry business, one that would go toe to toe with TSMC. Instead of creating Intel chips, the Intel foundry would manufacture designs for customers like makers of mobile phones and AI chips.
Intel hopes that being the first to wield high-NA technology will give it an edge in the silicon rat race, making it possible to print tiny patterns faster than anyone else.
It could also make things simpler for customers. Over the years, while waiting for EUV machines to emerge, chip designers used multi-patterning to squeeze more life out of the older forms of light. Every chip is made out of layers, which are laid down to make components like the switches and wiring. If you’re working on one of those layers and need to make features tinier than your machine can normally produce, you can break the pattern for that layer up into several patterns and then expose the wafer to them one at a time. This strategy helped chipmakers keep using older (and cheaper) machines while still creating tinier and tinier components. But multi-patterning is a hassle: It’s more challenging to design the complex overlay of patterns, and much slower to print each chip. Designing a chip is far easier if you know you can do “single patterning,” blasting each layer in one go.
Observers say it won’t be easy to build a foundry business that bests TSMC and Samsung on their own terrain. “Leapfrogging is difficult,” Hijink says. But it’s also true that the high-tech world has such a ravening hunger for better chips that Intel could succeed, simply because even TSMC and Samsung can’t fulfill all that need.
“There’s spillover demand, so Intel can survive off that,” Koch says. “It’s not even scraps now. It’s a meal. It may not be the best foundry, but they can make chips, and there’s only three companies that can do that, right?”
TSMC, for its part, seems to be biding its time when it comes to high NA. “TSMC will deploy high-NA EUV when it is mature and ready to deliver maximum benefit to our customers,” the company wrote to MIT Technology Review. Some suspect it won’t use the machines in serious volume until the 2030s. Part of the reason is cost: TSMC is ruthlessly focused on producing chips as cost-effectively as possible, and the high-NA tools are a blistering $400 million each, far more than the previous EUV rigs. And unlike those, the new machines are not a revolutionary leap upward.
“This is like 30% to 50% better in terms of capability,” says Koch, the analyst and former ASML employee. “This is probably the first tool that hasn’t obviously made business sense right away for ASML.”
It’s not that the industry won’t eventually embrace high NA en masse, Koch says. Most companies will need to, if they want to keep going smaller. But TSMC is more likely to push ahead as far as it can go with its existing EUV tools, using onerous multi-patterning to wring as much as it can out of that generation until it absolutely needs to switch.
“The industry has only shifted paradigms when it just absolutely cannot extend—even one more little bit—out of what it’s been doing,” Koch says.
China isn’t the only party looking to upset the current balance of power. The dominance of ASML, and the swelling cost of its tools, is prompting other upstarts too. But instead of trying to replicate ASML’s breakthroughs in EUV, they’re doing an end run—working on lithography tools that use entirely different forms of light. These will be far cheaper, they promise, and just as powerful.
One is Substrate, a San Francisco–based startup. Founded four years ago, it’s working on a tool that uses x-ray light produced by a particle accelerator. X-rays have a remarkably tiny wavelength, making them a potentially powerful way to create minute features.
Particle accelerators have historically been enormous, making them difficult to fit into a chipmaking process. Substrate says it has harnessed decades of scientific improvements in particle acceleration to produce a light source that’s smaller and suitable for mass production.
Last year the company released images showing that it had created fine patterns, which Proud, the CEO, says are only possible now with a high-NA EUV machine. He says Substrate’s goal is to produce chips at scale by 2030.
But Proud doesn’t intend to sell the tools to TSMC or Intel. Indeed, he doesn’t plan to sell them to anyone. Instead, Substrate wants to create its own fab, building chips using its own tools.
“The amount of chips we’re going to need is going to be many orders of magnitude larger than even the wildest projections you have now.”
James Proud, cofounder and CEO, Substrate
The semiconductor industry, Proud argues, needs new approaches, because it’s become too pricey and too centralized. A single fab today can cost $25 billion to build, up from about $5 billion in the 2010s, the company notes. It’s driving the cost of a single wafer full of advanced chips up toward $100,000, Proud says.
“That is, I think, a prohibitive cost,” he says. There also isn’t enough capacity in the supply chain: “It’s relatively slow and hard to flex to the current increase in demands.” He admires ASML’s EUV tooling—it’s “the apex implementation of that technology”—but new approaches are needed.
That’s partly for national security reasons. Proud and his team think it’s too dangerous for the US to rely on foreign supplies. But he also predicts the current AI boom will go into overdrive, creating a massive demand for chips that the existing ASML/TSMC duopoly won’t be able to deliver: “The amount of chips we’re going to need is going to be many orders of magnitude larger than even the wildest projections you have now.”
Substrate predicts it will be able to produce finished wafers at $10,000 a pop—a tenth of where Proud predicts the rest of the industry is heading. Proud says that’s partly because the company’s system will be vertically integrated, so it will control all parts of the chipmaking process, but also because its lithography tooling will be less complex: “We’re able to put together in a sort of simpler package.”
Still, Substrate is playing its cards close to its chest. Unlike ASML, the company isn’t offering nuanced detail on how it generates light, or on how that then translates into making patterns on a wafer.
Substrate’s ambitions give some industry observers pause. Hijink, who thinks it is probably “unachievable and impossible” to simultaneously master both a new form of lithography and high-throughput fab techniques, regards the company’s secrecy as a red flag. “This industry is about open innovation,” he says.
Koch is more impressed by its ambitions and funding. The type of technology it’s pursuing “is really cool,” he says. “It’s interesting.” But “there’s a long road between lab-scale demonstration and high volume,” he adds. “Is this like an imminent disruption to ASML? Probably not.”
Another startup that is aiming to hit the market around the same time as Substrate is Lace Lithography. Based in Norway, it is devising an entirely different approach—one that doesn’t use light at all. Instead, an energized beam of helium atoms is pointed at the pattern on the reticle. When the helium atoms then hit the wafer, the atoms transfer their energy to it, imparting the design to the chip.
The idea dates back a while. Bodil Holst, the CEO, took it up in 2008, when she was a physicist studying the use of atom beams. MIT professor Henry “Hank” Smith, a pioneer in using x-rays for lithography, told her she should explore using atoms as a mechanism for making microchips, because back then he wasn’t sure ASML’s EUV moonshot would work. “Even if it does, we’ll need atoms eventually,” he told her.
Holst did some experiments to investigate the idea further and partnered with a former PhD student—Adrià Salvador Palau, a physicist and expert in machine learning—to found Lace. Like Substrate’s, its tool is completely different from ASML’s massive machinery. The source of the excited atoms “looks a bit like a rocket motor,” says Palau. “It’s very cool.” While EUV’s wavelength is 13.5 nanometers, the helium atoms offer a precision of 0.1 nanometers. The process also requires far less power, and the machine is intended to be far smaller. Holst tells me the company aims to have machines ready to sell to fabs by 2029 or 2030.
“I think everybody’s really looking forward to something that extends a road map beyond light, beyond EUV,” Palau says.
ASML is watching these upstarts with curiosity. Benschop says he can’t assess whether Substrate’s technology will work reliably and affordably, because the company hasn’t explained anything about its processes. But he went to a conference where Holst and Palau did a presentation outlining Lace Lithography’s technology.
“I’m incredibly impressed with how they do it,” he says. The problem, he says, is he doesn’t think the process produces patterns on the wafer that are deep enough to be useful. “I cannot see how they would scale it to a viable volume product,” he told me.
He suspects ASML’s mastery of EUV will keep it on top for the near future. “So far, I have not seen a viable alternative,” he says. He thinks there’s “no serious runner-up” when it comes to volume manufacturing of the most advanced chip generations.
It’s true that major shifts in chipmaking are slow, says Chris Miller, a professor of international history at Tufts University and the author of Chip War, a book about the worldwide struggle for dominance in the industry. “No doubt we’ll eventually have alternatives [to EUV],” he told me via e-mail. “But it’s worth noting that lithography transitions have historically taken years, if not decades.”
ASML’s executives, too, are pondering their future. Benschop expects high-NA technology to dominate chipmaking into the 2030s. Beyond that? The industry has, indeed, tended to shift to a new form of light every decade.
“You may argue it’s time for the next decade,” he told me after we’d stripped off our bunny suits and he was relaxing with a coffee.
But ASML’s executives suspect they can continue to squeeze more capabilities out of EUV by increasing the numerical aperture even further on their existing machine. They’re already toying with a design that would take an NA of 0.55 to an NA of 0.75: “hyper NA.” It could let them pattern wafers with a resolution of six nanometers. They’re also working on standardizing their various optics into a platform of a single size, so customers could order one machine outfitted for either regular EUV, high NA, or hyper NA. If it’s all in the same-sized unit, it would simplify the costs and logistics of integrating each into a fab. If the company goes through with it, Benschop figures, the hyper-NA tool might hit the market seven or eight years from now and be sold in volume during the second half of the 2030s.
For now, the ball is in ASML’s court. “We’re pushing the limits of physics,” Pieters told me. The question now is whether anyone else can push harder.
Clive Thompson is a science and technology journalist based in New York City. He wrote about the development of ASML’s original EUV machine in MIT Technology Review’s 2021 issue on computing.
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