Every modern microprocessor – from the chip in your smartphone to the CPUs powering cloud AI – is born under ultraviolet light. In fact, some of the most advanced manufacturing machines on Earth shine invisible ultraviolet lasers onto silicon wafers to etch the nanoscale circuits that make microchips work. These machines cost upwards of $150 million each, are the size of a bus, and operate with almost sci-fi complexity – yet they are the unsung workhorses behind Moore’s Law and the continuous march of faster, smaller, more efficient processors reuters.com, technologyreview.com. Industry observers have even nicknamed the latest generation of these tools “the machines that saved Moore’s Law,” because without them, making cutting-edge chips would be practically impossible cloud.google.com. This report dives into the world of ultraviolet lithography – in both its traditional deep ultraviolet (DUV) and cutting-edge extreme ultraviolet (EUV) forms – explaining how it works, why it’s so critical for microprocessor development, and where it’s headed next.
Ultraviolet lithography might sound like esoteric engineering, but its impact is very real and visible in our daily lives. By printing ever finer patterns of transistors on silicon, UV lithography directly enables the tech industry’s remarkable pace of improvement. As one tech analyst bluntly put it, “Moore’s Law is basically falling apart, and without this machine, it’s gone. You can’t really make any leading-edge processors without EUV.” technologyreview.com In other words, the future of microchips – and all the gadgets and innovations they drive – now hinges on harnessing light at tiny wavelengths. Below, we’ll break down how this light-based printing works, how it evolved into the latest EUV technology, who the major players are (from Dutch toolmaker ASML to chip giants like TSMC, Samsung, and Intel), recent breakthroughs (like next-generation EUV machines and alternative techniques), and what industry experts are saying about the road ahead.
What is Ultraviolet Lithography?
At its core, lithography in chip fabrication is akin to photography on silicon. A silicon wafer is coated with a light-sensitive material (photoresist), and a machine uses focused light to project intricate circuit patterns onto that wafer through a stencil-like mask. The patterns correspond to the tiny transistors and wiring that make up a microprocessor. Wherever the light hits, it chemically changes the resist so those regions can be etched or processed, while covered areas remain protected. By repeating this process layer by layer with extreme precision, chipmakers build up the complex architecture of a modern integrated circuit.
The key to resolution in this “printing” process is the wavelength of light. Just as a finer brush lets an artist paint smaller details, a shorter light wavelength lets chipmakers etch finer features. For decades, the semiconductor industry has steadily pushed toward shorter wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum to print ever-smaller transistors technologyreview.com. Early chips in the 1960s used visible and long-UV light (g-line at 436 nm, i-line at 365 nm), but by the 1990s the state-of-the-art moved into the deep ultraviolet range with powerful excimer lasers at 248 nm (KrF) and later 193 nm (ArF) en.wikipedia.org. Light at 193 nm – about 1/5 the wavelength of visible light – became the workhorse for manufacturing chips throughout the 2000s and 2010s. This deep UV (DUV) lithography enabled minimum features on the order of ~50 nm and under, especially after the introduction of tricks like immersion lenses and multiple exposures en.wikipedia.org. In fact, “excimer laser lithography” at 248 nm and 193 nm was so successful that it drove Moore’s Law for about two decades, allowing transistor sizes to keep shrinking and chip densities to keep doubling on schedule en.wikipedia.org.
However, by the late 1990s and early 2000s, engineers knew they were approaching a wavelength wall with 193 nm light technologyreview.com. To pattern features much smaller than ~40–50 nm, 193 nm lithography had to resort to increasingly convoluted methods: exotic optical tricks, multiple-patterning steps (exposing the same layer several times with shifted masks to achieve finer effective pitch), and other clever workarounds cloud.google.com, orbitskyline.com. These techniques extended the life of DUV tools (indeed, chipmakers stretched 193 nm all the way down to nodes marketed as 10 nm or even 7 nm by using double, triple, or quadruple patterning), but at the cost of huge complexity, lower yield, and skyrocketing production cost. By the mid-2010s, it was clear that traditional DUV was straining to go further – the industry needed a leap to a shorter wavelength of light to keep Moore’s Law on track technologyreview.com.
Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) Lithography: The Workhorse
Deep UV lithography (using ~248 nm and 193 nm lasers) has been the workhorse technology for chip fabrication for many generations. DUV tools are essentially extremely precise projected imaging systems: they shine a UV laser through a patterned photomask and a series of reduction lenses to cast a minified image on the silicon wafer. Modern 193 nm systems even fill the gap between lens and wafer with ultra-pure water (immersion lithography) to effectively increase the lens’s numerical aperture and resolve smaller features en.wikipedia.org. Using these methods, 193 nm immersion lithography became capable of printing features far below its nominal wavelength – but only by employing resolution enhancement techniques and repeated exposures. For example, before EUV arrived, leading-edge 7 nm node chips were being realized with DUV by using four separate masking steps for a single layer (quadruple patterning) – an astoundingly complex exercise in precision alignment.
DUV lithography is highly mature and reliable. DUV tools from companies like ASML, Nikon, and Canon still handle the majority of layers in chip manufacturing today (even in cutting-edge fabs, only the most critical layers use EUV, while less critical layers continue to use multiple DUV exposures). These machines are also significantly cheaper than the latest EUV tools – a top-end immersion DUV scanner might cost on the order of $50–$100 million, whereas an EUV tool runs $150+ million fool.com. As a result, DUV tools remain indispensable not just for older-generation chips (where feature sizes are larger and easier to print), but also as a complement to EUV in advanced processes. In fact, DUV sales still make up the bulk of lithography equipment units shipped each year asml.com. Chipmakers have a massive installed base of DUV scanners and extensive know-how using them.
However, despite continued refinements, 193 nm DUV hit a fundamental limit in how much smaller it could go without untenable effort. The practical resolution in optical lithography follows roughly the Rayleigh criterion: minimum feature size ≈ k₁ · (λ/NA), where λ is the wavelength and NA is the lens aperture. With λ fixed at 193 nm and NA maxed out around 1.35 (immersion), chipmakers squeezed k₁ to its theoretical limits using computational tricks – but to keep shrinking feature size, λ itself had to shrink. By about 2019, leading foundries like TSMC and Samsung had commercially introduced a new lithography light source at 13.5 nm wavelength – nearly 15× shorter than DUV’s 193 nm orbitskyline.com. This ushered in the era of extreme ultraviolet lithography.
The Shift to Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) Lithography
Extreme Ultraviolet lithography (EUV) uses dramatically shorter wavelength light – 13.5 nm, on the border between UV and X-rays – to expose chips. By moving to this much finer “brush,” EUV can print much smaller transistors and features with a single exposure, avoiding many of the convoluted multi-patterning steps needed by DUV at advanced nodes orbitskyline.com. In practical terms, EUV lithography has enabled high-volume manufacturing of chips at the 7 nm, 5 nm, and 3 nm technology generations, with far fewer process steps and better yields than an all-DUV approach. For instance, Taiwan’s TSMC used EUV on a few critical layers starting with its 7 nm+ (N7+) process in 2019 – the first commercial process to use EUV tsmc.com – and then extensively for its 5 nm nodes that power processors like Apple’s A15 and A16 Bionic smartphone chips orbitskyline.com. Samsung similarly began mass production with EUV in early 2019 on its 7LPP process and has since deployed EUV for 5 nm and even in memory chip fabricationsemiconductor.samsung.com, trendforce.com. These moves were game-changers: by using 13.5 nm light, chipmakers could print features with single-pattern exposures that previously needed multiple DUV passes, simplifying manufacturing and allowing tighter transistor packing than ever before cloud.google.com.
However, EUV lithography was not an easy revolution. It took over two decades of research and ~$9–10 billion in R&D spending to make EUV viable for high-volume production cloud.google.com, technologyreview.com. The challenges were immense because 13.5 nm light behaves very differently from 193 nm light. For one, no material is transparent at 13.5 nm – you can’t use refractive lenses or conventional glass masks. Instead, EUV systems use an all-mirror optical system: a series of finely figured multilayer mirrors with special coatings that reflect 13.5 nm light (each mirror reflects only a portion of the light, so with multiple mirrors the intensity drops dramatically) en.wikipedia.org. The photomask is also a reflective mirror substrate rather than a transparent glass plate. All of this has to operate in vacuum (air would absorb EUV). In short, EUV scanners are a complete redesign of the optical system compared to DUV tools, involving exotic optics and extreme precision.
Then there’s the light source: how do you even generate high-intensity 13.5 nm ultraviolet light? The answer reads like sci-fi: EUV tools create light by firing a pulsed high-power laser at tiny droplets of molten tin, 50,000 times per second technologyreview.com, spectrum.ieee.org. Each laser pulse vaporizes a tin droplet into an extremely hot plasma that emits EUV radiation – essentially a miniature star-like explosion happening inside the machine. These plasma flashes produce the desired 13.5 nm light along with lots of other unwanted radiation and debris, so the system must filter and collect the right wavelength and shield everything else. The EUV light then gets focused by the mirror optics and directed onto the wafer in patterns. It’s a hugely inefficient process in terms of light generation (much of the energy is lost as heat), which is why the laser powering the source has to be incredibly powerful. An EUV scanner’s light source can consume on the order of >1 megawatt of power to deliver enough EUV photon flux for high-volume manufacturing tomshardware.com. By contrast, a 193 nm excimer laser uses a tiny fraction of that power. This explains why EUV tools have massive power and cooling requirements, and why alternate techniques like nanoimprint lithography (which uses no lasers at all) tout energy savings of ~90% tomshardware.com.
The complexity doesn’t end there. Because EUV photons are so energetic, they can induce subtle stochastic effects in the photoresist (random variations that can cause defects if not mitigated), and EUV masks can’t be protected by the usual pellicles easily (developing special EUV pellicles was another multi-year effort). Every piece of the system – from the vacuum stages, to the 6-degree-of-freedom wafer positioners moving at meters per second, to the defect inspection of those multilayer mirrors – pushed the limits of engineering. “It’s a very difficult technology – in terms of complexity it’s probably in the Manhattan Project category,” remarked Intel’s director of lithography, illustrating how challenging EUV was to develop technologyreview.com.
For many years, plenty of experts doubted EUV would ever work in time. Major players Nikon and Canon gave up on EUV research after encountering too many roadblocks, leaving ASML (Netherlands) as the lone company pushing the technology forwardtechnologyreview.comtechnologyreview.com. ASML’s bet eventually paid off – but not without help. In 2012, recognizing the strategic importance of EUV, big chipmakers Intel, TSMC, and Samsung jointly invested around $4 billion into ASML to accelerate EUV development semiwiki.com. By 2017, ASML finally unveiled a production-ready EUV scanner (model NXE:3400B), and by 2019 the first commercial chips made with EUV were rolling out cloud.google.com, technologyreview.com. Industry watchers hailed it as a watershed moment – the long-delayed EUV revolution had arrived just in time to extend the semiconductor roadmap. As MIT Technology Review noted, ASML’s EUV tool is “a coveted device… used in making microchip features as tiny as 13 nanometers… filled with 100,000 tiny mechanisms… it takes four 747s to ship one to a customer” technologyreview.com. In short, EUV scanners are marvels of modern engineering that bring ultraviolet light to bear at a scale and complexity never seen before.
Why UV Lithography Matters for Microprocessors
The payoff for all this complexity is straightforward: smaller transistors and higher chip performance. By printing finer features, chipmakers can cram more transistors into the same area (which typically means more computing power or lower cost per chip) and reduce the electrical capacitances and distances that signals must traverse (which means faster switching speeds and lower power consumption). This is the essence of Moore’s Law – shrinking transistor dimensions to pack more into each chip generation – and lithography is the fundamental enabler of that progress cloud.google.com, technologyreview.com. When you hear about a new smartphone chip made on a “3 nm process” or a server CPU on “5 nm EUV technology,” those numbers largely reflect the capabilities of advanced lithography to define extremely small features (though the node names are somewhat marketing, they correlate with density improvements that EUV has made possible).
Ultraviolet lithography’s importance is perhaps best illustrated by considering what would happen without these advances. If the industry had stuck with 193 nm DUV only, chipmakers might still have found ways to make very powerful chips – but they would need so many repetitive processing steps (and yield-killing complexity) that costs would skyrocket and progress would slow dramatically. Indeed, around the mid-2010s, some were predicting the imminent end of Moore’s Law because optical lithography was hitting the wall. EUV came just in time to provide a new lifeline. By restoring a simpler single-exposure patterning at the cutting edge, EUV has extended the scaling roadmap for at least a few more generations. A host of today’s most advanced chips owe their existence to EUV. For example, Apple’s latest A-series smartphone processors and M-series Mac chips are fabricated by TSMC using 5 nm EUV processes, enabling transistor counts of tens of billions and major leaps in speed and efficiency over previous generations orbitskyline.com. AMD’s Ryzen CPUs and GPUs, many of which are made on TSMC 7 nm or 5 nm EUV nodes, likewise enjoy the density bump and power savings. Even cutting-edge AI accelerators and data center processors – the kind that power large-scale AI models – rely on EUV-based 5 nm/4 nm processes to pack matrix-math engines densely and manage power thermals.
It’s not just logic chips. Memory chips are also reaping benefits from UV lithography advances. Manufacturers of high-performance DRAM have started using EUV for certain critical layers in their latest generations (e.g. Samsung’s 14 nm-class DRAM uses EUV on several layers) to increase bit density and improve yields trendforce.com. Micron is introducing EUV in its next DRAM node as well. More EUV layers in memory translate to more gigabits of storage per chip and lower cost per bit, which ultimately means more memory in your devices for the same price. In fact, ASML’s CEO Peter Wennink has pointed out that surging demand for AI and data is pushing memory makers to adopt EUV quickly – “DRAM manufacturers are using more EUV layers on current and future nodes”, he noted, which is boosting demand for these tools industry-wide trendforce.com.
In short, UV lithography directly affects microprocessor capability. The ability to fabricate smaller transistors not only lets you fit more cores or more cache on a chip, but it can also reduce the power required for each transistor switching. This is why each new process generation often brings a 15–30% performance gain and 20–50% power reduction at the same design, or alternatively allows doubling or more of transistor density. For example, TSMC’s move from a 7 nm (largely DUV) process to 5 nm (EUV) offered around 1.8× increase in logic density and ~15% speed gain at iso-power appleinsider.com. Those improvements translate into faster smartphones, more efficient data centers, and breakthroughs in high-performance computing tasks. Ultraviolet lithography is the invisible hand that carves these improvements into the silicon. As one industry research director summed it up: “Without EUV, you can’t really make any leading-edge processors” technologyreview.com – it’s that critical to staying on the curve of progress.
Current State-of-the-Art and Major Players
As of 2025, ultraviolet lithography lies at the heart of every advanced chip fab, and it’s dominated by a few key players and technologies. Here’s a look at the current landscape and the major forces driving it:
- ASML (Netherlands) – The Lithography Linchpin. ASML is the sole provider of EUV lithography systems globally reuters.com. In the late 2010s it became the first (and only) company to commercialize EUV scanners, after competitors dropped out technologyreview.com. Its EUV tools (each costing around $150–$180 million reuters.com, technologyreview.com) are used by every leading-edge chipmaker. ASML also produces DUV scanners (where it competes with Nikon/Canon for market share). Thanks to EUV, ASML has grown into one of the world’s most valuable semiconductor equipment firms – essentially holding a monopoly on the most advanced lithography tech. A single cutting-edge fab may need a fleet of 10–20 ASML EUV machines, representing a multi-billion-dollar investment. As of 2021, over 100 EUV tools were already in the field technologyreview.com, and that number continues to rise as TSMC, Samsung, and Intel expand EUV usage. (Notably, export controls currently prevent ASML from selling EUV machines to China, due to their strategic importance reuters.com.)
- TSMC (Taiwan) – Foundry Pioneer in EUV. TSMC is the world’s largest contract chip manufacturer and was the first to deploy EUV in volume production (its 7nm+ “N7+” node in 2019 was the industry’s inaugural EUV process) tsmc.com. TSMC has since leveraged EUV extensively for its 5 nm generation (2019–2020) and 4 nm/3 nm nodes, producing chips for Apple, AMD, Nvidia, and many others with world-class yields. By using EUV on a number of critical layers, TSMC achieved the density increases that define those nodes. TSMC’s leadership in mastering EUV early is a big reason it pulled ahead of Intel in process technology in recent years. Looking forward, TSMC plans to continue using current EUV (0.33 NA) through its 3 nm and even 2 nm nodes, and is evaluating next-gen EUV for beyond that trendforce.com. (Interestingly, TSMC has indicated it may not rush to adopt the first High-NA EUV tools for its 2 nm-era processes around 2027–2028, preferring to wait until the economics make sense trendforce.com.)
- Samsung (South Korea) – Memory and Logic Adopter. Samsung was quick to adopt EUV for logic, announcing 7 nm EUV production as early as 2019 (its Exynos mobile processors and some Qualcomm Snapdragon chips used these). Samsung also spearheaded the use of EUV in memory, becoming the first to use EUV in DRAM fabrication (for its 1z-nm DRAM node) and in V-NAND layering trendforce.com. Samsung’s EUV-capable fab line in Hwaseong has been a showcase, and the company continues to invest in EUV for both its foundry business and memory business. Like TSMC, Samsung is a customer of ASML’s upcoming High-NA EUV, though reports suggest Samsung hasn’t finalized when it will introduce those tools in production trendforce.com. In the meantime, Samsung’s current flagship processes (5 nm, 4 nm, 3 nm Gate-All-Around transistors) all utilize EUV to reduce masking steps. Samsung also still produces many chips using DUV and older tools, but for leading-edge it’s fully in on EUV.
- Intel (USA) – Racing to Rejoin the Front. Intel, long a lithography leader, encountered delays at its 10 nm node (which used advanced DUV multi-patterning) and thus lagged in EUV adoption. But it has since invested heavily to catch up. Intel’s newest process generations (branded “Intel 4”, “Intel 3”, roughly equivalent to ~7 nm and ~5 nm class) use EUV lithography for multiple layers – Intel 4, for example, employs EUV in manufacturing the company’s upcoming Meteor Lake CPUs reuters.com. Intel was also an early investor in ASML and has secured first-in-line access to ASML’s High-NA EUV machines: it received the world’s first High-NA EUV tool (EXE:5000 series) in 2023 for R&D and is slated to get the first production-level High-NA tool (EXE:5200) by 2024–2025 reuters.com, trendforce.com. Intel plans to use those High-NA EUV scanners for its 1.8 nm and 14Å-generation nodes (~2027 timeframe) as part of its ambitious roadmap to regain process leadership trendforce.com, trendforce.com. With new CEO leadership, Intel is openly touting its embrace of EUV and even services as a foundry using EUV to make chips for other companies in the near future.
- Nikon and Canon (Japan) – Veterans of DUV, Exploring Alternatives. Nikon and Canon were once dominant suppliers of lithography equipment (in the 1990s, Nikon in particular led in cutting-edge steppers). They continue to manufacture DUV lithography tools – in fact, for many years Nikon supplied machines to Intel and memory makers. But neither company delivered an EUV solution: both withdrew from EUV development after early 2000s research, ceding that market to ASML technologyreview.com. Today, Nikon still sells 193 nm immersion scanners for high-volume manufacturing (especially used in non-leading-edge fabs or as complementary tools), while Canon has focused on specialized niches like nanoimprint lithography (NIL). Canon’s new NIL machines attempt to “stamp” chip patterns mechanically and claim an order-of-magnitude lower cost and 90% less power usage than EUV tools fortune.comtomshardware.com. Canon began shipping its first NIL tools for trial in 2024 tomshardware.com. Some see NIL as a potential disruptive technology for certain applications (it could be used alongside conventional lithography for simpler layers or memory devices), but it’s not yet proven for high-volume, highest-density logic production tomshardware.com. For now, Nikon and Canon remain significant in the DUV space (and for older nodes), but ASML has an effective monopoly on the advanced lithography needed for cutting-edge microprocessors.
- China’s Aspirations – Closing the Gap Under Restrictions. China, which hosts major chip fabs like SMIC, currently lacks access to EUV technology – ASML has never been permitted to sell EUV scanners to China due to export restrictions led by the US cnfocus.com. Even sales of ASML’s latest DUV immersion tools to China are now subject to Dutch government licensing as of 2023 reuters.com. This has spurred Chinese efforts to develop indigenous lithography. The leading Chinese litho equipment company, SMEE (Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment), reportedly has built machines capable of 90 nm and 28 nm class DUV lithography, but nothing close to EUV yet (EUV involves a vast ecosystem of patents and hard physics problems). As a result, Chinese fabs like SMIC have managed to produce a 7 nm-like chip using older DUV multiple patterning, but they remain a couple generations behind the leading edge that requires EUV. Global market trends are thus deeply entwined with geopolitics: lithography tools have become a strategic asset. In 2024, ASML’s sales to China (mostly DUV tools) were about $7 billion reuters.com, but future growth is uncertain due to tightening export controls. Meanwhile, demand is booming elsewhere, so ASML projects its EUV business to jump ~30% in 2025 despite potential China headwinds trendforce.com, spglobal.com.
Challenges and Recent Advancements
While ultraviolet lithography has enabled remarkable progress, it also faces significant challenges that drive ongoing innovation. Here are some key pain points and the recent advancements addressing them:
- Tool Cost & Complexity: The price tag of EUV scanners (~$150 million or more each) and their sheer complexity raise the barrier to entry for chipmakers reuters.com. Only a few companies can afford huge fleets of these tools. To justify the cost, fabs need high utilization and high yield. Advancement: The next-generation High-NA EUV tools are even more expensive (>$300 million each) reuters.com, but promise greater throughput and resolution, potentially lowering cost per transistor. Additionally, efforts in machine learning and computational lithography help maximize the performance of each tool (by improving pattern fidelity and process windows).
- Throughput (Scanner Speed): Early EUV tools processed fewer wafers per hour than their DUV counterparts, partly due to limited source power and more delicate optics. Low throughput means lower fab productivity. Advancement: EUV source power has steadily improved (today’s sources exceed 250 W, vs. ~125 W in initial production tools), and ASML’s latest EUV scanners can expose ~160 wafers/hour in optimal conditions. The upcoming High-NA EUV systems will have redesigned optics with higher numerical aperture 0.55 vs 0.33, which improves resolution but initially reduces field size. To compensate, ASML is engineering these tools to eventually hit ~185 wafers/hour throughput. In fact, ASML just shipped its first High-NA EUV model (EXE:5200) in 2025 and says it will deliver a 60% productivity boost over current EUV tools – roughly 175 wafers/hour, which is on par with DUV scanners trendforce.com.
- Defects & Yield: Because EUV uses reflective masks and operates in nano-scale dimensions, defect control is a huge concern. Tiny mask defects or particles can print on the wafer, and the EUV photoresists and process can exhibit random defects (stochastic issues) if not optimized. Advancement: The industry developed protective mask pellicles for EUV (to keep particles off the mask) after many iterations. Photoresist chemistry is also evolving – new resist materials and underlayer techniques have improved sensitivity and line-edge roughness. Chipmakers report that initial yield hit issues with EUV have largely been overcome, and defect rates are comparable to prior nodes orbitskyline.com. Still, researchers continue to refine resist and mask tech (including exploring metal oxide resists and other novel approaches for EUV).
- Power Consumption: As mentioned, EUV scanners are power-hungry – each one can draw on the order of a megawatt of electricity between the laser source, vacuum pumps, and cooling systems tomshardware.com. This contributes to the considerable operating cost and raises the environmental footprint of fabs. Advancement: Alternative lithography methods like Nanoimprint aim to cut power drastically (Canon claims 90% less energy usage) tomshardware.com. Within EUV itself, engineers are striving for more efficient sources (e.g. higher conversion efficiency of laser energy to EUV light) so future tools produce more light with less input power. Even small gains in source efficiency or mirror reflectivity can yield significant power savings over thousands of wafers.
- Limits of Optical Resolution: Even EUV at 13.5 nm will eventually hit scaling limits. The current EUV tools (0.33 NA) can comfortably do ~30 nm pitch patterns; beyond that, multiple patterning or High-NA EUV will be needed for ~2 nm node and below. Advancement: High-NA EUV is essentially the next big step – by increasing the lens NA to 0.55 with a new optical design (which, notably, requires a new 6-inch mask size and all new tool platform), these systems will be able to resolve features ~30–40% smaller reuters.com. ASML says High-NA EUV could nearly triple transistor density on chips by enabling finer features and tighter pitches reuters.com. The first High-NA EUV tools are slated for pilot use by Intel around 2025–2026, targeting high-volume use by ~2028 trendforce.com. This extension should take the industry through the 2 nm, 1.5 nm, and 1 nm nodes (despite the naming, these will involve feature pitches in the low tens of nanometers). Beyond that, other approaches may be needed (like “Beyond EUV” concepts at even shorter wavelengths, or revolutionary patterning methods).
- Alternative Lithography Techniques: The concentration of critical lithography capability in one company (ASML) and one technology (EUV) has prompted interest in alternative or auxiliary techniques. Advancement: Aside from Canon’s NIL, there’s work on Directed Self-Assembly (DSA) – using special materials that spontaneously form very fine patterns, which can complement lithography for certain structures. Another approach is multiphoton or quantum lithography, still largely academic. E-beam lithography (direct-writing with electron beams) is used for mask making and prototyping, but too slow for mass production. Nonetheless, companies are exploring multi-beam e-beam tools for niche patterning. These alternatives, if matured, could one day reduce the load on optical lithography or cut costs for some layers. For now, they’re “nice to have” research, while optical UV lithography remains the indispensable mainstay.
Expert Insights and Future Outlook
The consensus among industry experts is that ultraviolet lithography will continue to be the lynchpin of chip fabrication for the foreseeable future, albeit with ongoing evolution. “We keep engineering and developing… there’s a steep learning curve for us and our customers,” an ASML spokesperson said regarding the rollout of High-NA EUV, underscoring that each new leap (like High-NA) requires extensive fine-tuning reuters.com. Analysts also caution that cost-effectiveness will guide adoption: “While some chipmakers may introduce [High-NA EUV] earlier to gain tech leadership, the majority will not adopt it until it makes sense economically,” noted Jeff Koch of SemiAnalysis, predicting most will wait until ~2030 when its advantage justifies the expenser euters.com. In response, ASML’s CEO Peter Wennink insists that High-NA will prove its worth sooner: “Everything we’re seeing with customers is that High-NA is cheaper [for them]” in achieving next-level scaling reuters.com. This optimistic view suggests that, as complexity grows, more advanced lithography might actually reduce overall costs by cutting out extra process steps.
One cannot overstate ASML’s central role – a fact not lost on governments. In a world where cutting-edge chips confer economic and military advantages, lithography equipment has become a strategic asset. The Dutch government (with U.S. backing) has strictly limited ASML’s exports of advanced tools to China reuters.com, a move aimed at “stymieing Beijing’s semiconductor ambitions” reuters.com. This has led to a bifurcation in the global chip supply chain: the most advanced logic chips are currently only produced in a handful of places (Taiwan, South Korea, and soon the U.S. via TSMC/Intel fabs), all using ASML’s EUV machines. China is investing heavily to catch up in older nodes and develop homegrown lithography, but experts estimate it could take many years to approach parity, if ever, given the steep knowledge and IP barriers.
Meanwhile, demand for UV lithography tools is surging in step with the semiconductor boom. The growth of AI and high-performance computing is driving leading fabs to expand capacity. ASML’s order books for EUV tools hit record highs – in one recent quarter, orders ballooned to $10 billion, largely for future EUV and High-NA systems tomshardware.com. The company forecasts that EUV-related revenues will jump ~40–50% in 2025 spglobal.com, helping to boost its total sales despite slower demand from memory or China spglobal.com. In other words, the state-of-the-art lithography market is robust and growing, with ASML expecting to ship dozens more EUV units each year. By 2030, High-NA EUV will likely be proliferating, and talk will turn to what comes after EUV’s era.
What might come next? Some researchers talk about “Beyond EUV” – perhaps using even shorter wavelengths in the soft X-ray range (~6–8 nm) or electron/ion projection lithography – but each of those paths faces daunting physics challenges. For now, the industry strategy is to get the most out of EUV: first by rolling out High-NA EUV for another 1–2 generations of shrink, and by combining EUV with clever process integration (such as chiplet architectures and 3D stacking, which alleviate the need for monolithic 2D shrinks). Lithography will remain a mix of techniques: DUV isn’t going away (it will be used in tandem with EUV), and novel methods like nanoimprint may find a niche to supplement mainstream processes if they prove themselves. But any radical shift away from optical lithography would likely require a paradigm change in chip design too – something not yet on the horizon for high-volume manufacturing.
In the words of TSMC’s Chairman Mark Liu, the semiconductor industry has been “working in a tunnel” with a clear goal for decades: shrink, shrink, shrink cloud.google.com. Ultraviolet lithography has been the light guiding that tunnel. It started with mercury lamps and primitive UV, progressed to excimer deep-UV lasers that carried us for 20+ years en.wikipedia.org, and now has reached the extreme-UV era, extending the tunnel further. The journey has been anything but easy – marked by moments of triumph and frequent doubt – yet the result is nothing short of astonishing: billions of structures just tens of atoms wide, patterned flawlessly across large wafers, enabling computational feats that seemed impossible a generation ago.
As we look ahead, microprocessor development is more intertwined with lithography than ever. The performance and capabilities of the next CPUs, GPUs, and AI accelerators will be determined in large part by how finely and reliably we can print their features. Ultraviolet lithography is the master tool that makes this possible. Industry experts are optimistic that with continued innovations – from High-NA optics to smarter software and maybe some out-of-the-box ideas like NIL or DSA – lithography will keep delivering. The CEO of ASML even suggests that the roadmap for EUV and its extensions is solid for the next decade, giving chipmakers a clear runway to continue improvements. The global market trends indicate healthy growth and intense competition, but also a coalescence around a few pivotal technologies and suppliers.
In summary, the world of ultraviolet lithography is a fusion of cutting-edge physics and engineering with high-stakes economics and strategy. It may operate in the invisible realm of UV light, but its impact is vividly clear in the form of more powerful microprocessors year after year. Next time you hear about a new “nanometer” chip breakthrough, remember the ultraviolet revolution working behind the scenes. From deep UV to extreme UV and beyond, these technologies are truly shaping the future of microchips – etching the next lines in the story of human technological progress, one photon flash at a time.
Sources
- C. Thompson, “Inside the machine that saved Moore’s Law,” MIT Technology Review, Oct. 27, 2021 technologyreview.com
- Wikipedia, “Photolithography – Current state-of-the-art tools use 193 nm deep UV excimer lasers” en.wikipedia.org
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- Orbit Skyline (Semiconductor FAB Solutions Blog), “Exploring the Future of EUV Lithography and Beyond,” Nov. 4, 2024 orbitskyline.com
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