There is but one company in the world that builds the $200 million school bus-sized EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) machines that are used to etch circuitry patterns thinner than human hair onto a silicon wafer. That company is ASML, a Dutch outfit that took in nearly $26 billion in revenue last year. EUV machines are necessary to manufacture chips under 7nm because you need to etch extremely fine lines to accommodate the billions of transistors that are packed into cutting-edge chips.
Canon announces a NIL lithography machine that could challenge EUV technology
ASML’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machine which is about the size of a school bus
The Japanese company explains what makes NIL different. “In contrast to conventional photolithography equipment, which transfers a circuit pattern by projecting it onto the resist coated wafer, the new product does it by pressing a mask imprinted with the circuit pattern on the resist on the wafer like a stamp. Because its circuit pattern transfer process does not go through an optical mechanism, fine circuit patterns on the mask can be faithfully reproduced on the wafer. Thus, complex two- or three-dimensional circuit patterns can be formed in a single imprint.”
But there is a problem here that the U.S. will have to address quickly. ASML does not ship its EUV machines to China due to U.S. sanctions, but it is possible that since NIL doesn’t use cutting-edge optics or mirrors like EUV does, Canon might be able to ship the technology to China giving foundries like SMIC (the largest in China) the ability to produce 5nm and eventually 3nm and 2nm chips.
