Post by ASML

How do you wrap your mind around one of the most complex technologies ever built? The scale of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology is hard to imagine, so let’s make it more concrete. Here are four numbers that capture the decades of innovation, nanoscale precision and cutting-edge engineering behind EUV: 🕐 35 years: It took more than three decades to get from the first EUV images, exposed in the mid 1980s to the first EUV-enabled commercial product in 2019. 📐 13.5 nm: The short wavelength of EUV light enables EUV systems to print the sub-10 nm features inside today’s advanced chips. 💥50,000 droplets per second: Lasers have to vaporize tens of thousands of tin droplets every second to produce enough EUV light for lithography – and this number continues to grow as EUV technology advances. 🏎️ 11g: The reticle stages in our EUV systems have accelerations as high as 11 times gravitational acceleration so they can maximize system throughput. EUV is full of numbers that sound almost unreal. Which ones should we explore next?