In 2019, Jos Benschop stood up to speak at a workshop and took out his Samsung phone. ASML had brought him in back in 1997 to start its extreme ultraviolet program. By his own account, in a story ASML published in 2022, he told the room: “I once said naively that EUV would be in volume production in 2006. I shamefully admit that it’s 13 years late.” Then he waved the phone: “but some of you thought this thing would never exist.”
Chips are made by projecting circuit patterns onto silicon with light, and a shorter wavelength is one important way to shrink the lines. The industry was using 193-nanometer light. EUV is 13.5 nanometers, and almost everything absorbs it, air and glass included, so the machine has to run in a vacuum and steer the light with mirrors. To make the light, a laser hits droplets of molten tin 50,000 times a second, twice each.
ASML formed a European research consortium for EUV in 1998 and joined an American one in 1999. In 2001 it gave a small team modest resources to build a prototype. In 2006 the first prototypes went out, to imec in Belgium and to a university lab in Albany, New York. That same year ASML shipped its first volume-production machine for immersion lithography, a refinement of the 193-nanometer technology it already sold.
The light was the problem. In 2011 an analyst told IEEE Spectrum that EUV had once been expected in production as early as 2005, and that the light-source makers “haven’t met any of their schedules.” Benschop later recalled customers quoting ASML’s old source roadmap back at it. “They practically crucified us at SPIE,” he said.
Then the biggest customers started paying to speed it up. In the summer of 2012, Intel, TSMC and Samsung agreed to put €1.38 billion into ASML’s research over five years and to buy a combined 23 percent of the company for €3.85 billion.
In October, ASML agreed to buy Cymer, the San Diego light-source maker it had worked with closely on EUV for over a year, for €1.95 billion. The same announcement gave the state of play. On customers’ machines the sources were running at up to 11 watts, enough for about 7 wafers an hour. The target was 105 watts and 69 wafers an hour, “to be achieved for 2014 microchip production.”
The Cymer deal closed in 2013. 2014 came and went. The engineers eventually pushed the source to 250 watts, enough for 125 wafers an hour. Samsung started wafer production on an EUV process in October 2018, and TSMC began volume production in the second quarter of 2019. That year Samsung released the first consumer product with EUV-made chips, a phone.
In ASML’s 2019 annual report, CEO Peter Wennink called it “the year that EUV lithography really broke through,” after “a 20-year EUV journey.” The same report said ASML had planned to ship 30 EUV machines that year. It shipped 26. Four slipped into early 2020, held up by delays in its supply chain.