Name: How ASML Makes Chips Faster With Its New $400 Million High NA Machine
Uploaded: 2025-05-27T22:13:07.000Z
Duration: 17 min 25 s
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All right, we're about to enter the high and A-level.

Adverbs of degree

Behind this highly secured door in an ASML cleanroom, there's a giant $400 million machine.

Made with such closely protected technical specificity.

Very complex, the most advanced machine tool in history.

That no filming's ever been allowed, even by ASML's own team, until we flew across the world to see it.

We're here at ASML's headquarters in the Netherlands, where 100% of the world's extreme ultraviolet lithography machines are made.

And now the next generation machines called HiNA.

We had to wear these bunny suits to protect these extremely precise machines from getting contaminated by our own hair and skin cells.

This is HiNumerical Aperture, HiNA, the new generation of EUV machines.

The only machines in the world capable of printing nanoscopic blueprints onto the most advanced chips.

NVIDIA, Apple, Taiwan Semiconductor, Samsung, Intel, none of their advanced chips can be made without EUV.

And this company has that market completely cornered.

The first HiNA machine was installed in the U.S. at Intel's Oregon Chip Fabrication

Indeed, the machine is so big you can't ship it in once.

Now they're being ramped up to make millions of chips on the factory floors of the few companies that can afford them.

ASML says eventually HiNA will be used by all its EUV customers, other advanced chipmakers like Micron, SK Hynix and Rapidus.

Without EUV, without very advanced logic manufacturing, most probably AI cannot happen.

CNBC went from ASML's labs in California all the way to its Veldhoven, Netherlands headquarters to bring you this never-before-seen look at the world's most advanced chipmaking machine and to ask its makers exactly how it works and what could go wrong amidst Trump's tariffs, export controls and a new training facility coming to the U.S.

It's basically to blow off all the contamination from your suit and your clothes.

On several long hallways where humongous parts are being meticulously moved.

How many people would you say are working here 24-7?

Inside the EUV factory alone, it's like 2,000 people.

Essia Haddou took us to the restricted lab space where 40 years of ASML's technology research all comes together.

It takes approximately a year and a half to create this system.

Haddou leads the team that tests and qualifies the HiNA machines here.

I think even if you learn more about it, it blows your mind even more.

The big machine, at the end of the day, is used to transfer a pattern, which we store on a mask, onto a wafer.

And then at the end of the day, you cut them in pieces, you package them and then you end up in your phone.

Joost Benschap joined Dutch electronics giant Philips in 1984.

Two weeks later, ASML was founded as a subsidiary, conducting research out of a leaky shed nearby in Eindhoven.

Haddou broke off from Philips with an IPO in 1995.

And two years later, Benschap helped spearhead ASML's first foray into EUV.

Three, four years later, we had enough confidence to put all our eggs in one basket called EUV.

With hindsight, we can say we placed the right bet.

On a yearly basis, I think we filed several hundred of patents on EUV.

Christophe Fouquet began as CEO just over a year ago, but he's been with ASML more than 17 years.

I think sometimes people forget that, but EUV took us practically more than 20 years.

I would say it's been a very risky investment because when we started, well, there was no guarantee the technology would work.

By 2018, ASML had shown that EUV was possible.

And it's the same process used in high N.A.

Chips are built in a grid formation on thinly sliced wafers of silicon, each with up to 100 thin layers that make up billions of transistors that determine what the chips can do.

These layers are printed using lithography, extremely precise rays of light projected through a mask of the chip design until they hit the surface of the wafer that's been coated with photoresist chemicals.

ASML's older generation DUV machines, which it still makes, use rays of deep ultraviolet light with a wavelength of 193 nanometers.

Nikon and Canon in Japan are still competitors in DUV.

But ASML's real breakthrough came with that bold bet on a technology many thought was impossible, using even shorter wavelength extreme ultraviolet light, EUV, something that to this day, no other company does.

A few more people tried for many years, but the size of the investment, the commitment you have to have, I think discouraged quite a few people.

Transistors have gotten so small, down to 10,000 times thinner than a human hair, that

ASML decided to create its own source of smaller, more precise EUV light.

At a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, it's the width of just five DNA strands laid side-by-side.

So small that it gets absorbed by almost everything.

And that's why this whole system needs to be in a vacuum.

This tiny thread may look like the strand of a spiderweb, but it's actually molten tin being shot out at 50,000 droplets a second.

The tin droplets are vaporized with a laser, and those tiny explosions are what emit photons of EUV light.

It's been used in the car industry for many years.

They would cut through steel with one of these.

We use four of them to shoot at one of these tiny tin droplets to generate a plasma, which is hotter than the sun.

That plasma generates EUV, and that EUV is captured by this collector mirror that comes from Goudsize and brings the light into our scanner.

The light bounces off of mirrors that aim it through the lens, much like how a camera works.

Because EUV gets absorbed by typical mirrors, German optics company Zeiss made specific mirrors just for ASML that are the flattest man-made surfaces in the world.

And then the light is emitted through the projection optics onto the wafer, which is about here.

When the EUV finally hits photoresist chemicals on the surface of the silicon wafer, it prints the minuscule blueprint that makes up the chip.

The aim needs to be so precise, TSMC says it's equivalent to shining a laser from the moon to hit a coin on the earth.

EUV made up less than 8% of ASML's total number of machines sold in 2024.

44 EUV machines versus 374 cheaper DUV machines.

But with a price tag of $220 million, EUV made up 38% of ASML's system sales revenue.

The cost of the chips the tool is going to create is going down.

Because you're the only company in the world that makes these machines, what's stopping you from setting the price even higher?

Well, what stopped us is Moore's law says that we need to continue to drive costs down.

This allows you to go to the next node and then the next node and then again the next node.

If this was to stop, then everyone gets stuck.

ASML began developing its latest $400 million HiNA machines around 2016.

Inside, all the same processes still happen with the same EUV light source.

We increased the aperture of the opening angle of the lens.

HiNA stands for high numerical aperture, meaning it has a larger lens opening, increasing the angle at which the light is captured by the mirrors.

More light coming in from steeper angles allows HiNA machines to capture increasingly small designs on chip masks so they can be projected in one exposure step, whereas original lower NA machines reach higher resolution to project these tiny designs using multiple exposures through multiple masks.

One becomes two, then two becomes three, three becomes four.

And when the number increases, it gets very complex process-wise and the yield goes down.

But with a higher NA, resolution improves and the small designs can be printed with fewer masks, saving time and money.

The larger the number, the smaller the thing you can print.

But this higher NA also comes with a much higher price tag for one main reason.

The higher the NA of an optic, the bigger the mirror you have to use and therefore the bigger the system.

These machines also take up a huge amount of power.

If we don't improve the power efficiency of our AI chips over time, the training of the models could consume the entire worldwide energy.

Since the moment we started EUV in 2018, we have reduced the power, the energy needed per wafer exposure by more than 60 percent.

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How ASML Makes Chips Faster With Its New $400 Million High NA Machine

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