ASML demonstrates production-ready EUV tool throughput
Although you may not have heard of ASML, you've certainly heard of its customers. The company provides lithography equipment to major semiconductor manufacturers around the world, including Intel. That means ASML plays a crucial role in driving down process sizes and pushing Moore's Law forward. Extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) is widely understood to be one of the next steps on that road. The company has been developing extreme ultraviolet lithography tools for some time now, but production-ready versions of that hardware have proven elusive. For just one example, an AMD presentation (PDF) projected that EUV "could be ready for high volume manufacturing of semiconductor chips in 2012 or 2013" all the way back in 2007. Today, GlobalFoundries has only committed to "EUV compatibility at key levels" for its upcoming 7-nm process, and TSMC expects to begin deploying EUV technology in 2020 at its purported 5-nm node.
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