Intel video shows the $400 million tool that will help it take process leadership from TSMC, Samsung،
Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines are huge, the size of a school bus. And they are expensive too. Only one company, Dutch company ASML, makes the machines used to etch circuit patterns onto silicon wafers. As chips get smaller and contain billions of transistors, these patterns need to be finer than human hair and that's where EUV machines come in.
The latest generation of EUV machine, known as High-NA EUV, is expected to be used to help build chips using a 2nm process node and smaller. As we told you in December, Intel was the first company to purchase the $400 million machine and plans to use it for chip production using its 18A (18 angstrom) process node. of 1.8 nm from next year (but not for high volume production). ).
As it promised more than two years ago, Intel will have taken back process leadership from TSMC and
Samsung Foundry. These last two foundries will be at 2nm by the second half of next year. Nevertheless, Intel's main goal is to learn how to operate the machine impeccably so that the company has no problems with high-volume production using its 14A process node (1.4 nm) which should
start in 2027.
The reason this is so important is that the feature size of a chip decreases as the process node number decreases. Smaller transistors mean that a chip can contain more transistors, and the higher the number of transistors in a component, the more powerful and/or power efficient that chip is. The
iPhone 11 lineup in 2019 was powered by the 7nm A13 Bionic SoC containing 8.5 billion transistors. The 3nm A17
Pro SoC, used to power the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max 2023, contains 19 billion transistors in each chipset.
Intel's purchase of ASML's Twinscan EXE:5000 High-NA EUV machine was delivered to the company in 250 separate crates that, according to Tom's Hardware, weighed 330,000 pounds. Although the unit was installed in Intel's factory, it will take six months of work by 250 ASML and Intel engineers to fully install the EUV High-NA machine. And it could take several weeks or months to calibrate the machine that prints at 8nm resolution versus the 13nm resolution that current EUV Low-NA machines print at.
The result? An ability to produce transistors 1.7 times smaller that can triple the transistor density of a chip. ASML claims to have received 10 to 20 orders for its EUV High-NA from companies including TSMC, Samsung Foundry and SK Hynix.
