About a year ago, The Oregonian published an article that really does a great job of describing what kind of technology I get the opportunity to work with at ASML. Follow the link to check it out!
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2017/11/asml_euv_lithography_intel_hil.html
The future of the semiconductor industry relies on a $120 million machine the size of a school bus.
It's a far-out tool that projects narrow waves of light onto silicon wafers, sketching patterns for the circuitry inside future computers, smartphones and the self-driving cars just now beginning to appear on our roadways.
Known in the semiconductor industry as extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV, it could extend by years the pace of innovation in computer chip technology. A Dutch company called ASML invented the technology, backed by Intel and other large chipmakers that invested billions of dollars to enable it.
Long delayed by technical challenges that confounded the entire industry, EUV is finally ready for prime time. As ASML prepares to begin installing its new tools at factories around the world, the staff at its Hillsboro outpost has grown to 500, more than double the number who worked there in the summer of 2016.
ASML uses four or five 747s to ship the EUV tool from the Netherlands to factories in Oregon and around the world. It takes a fleet of 20 trucks to transport it from airports to factories. But the enormous dimensions belie the tiny scale on which EUV operates.
ASML's machine drops thousands of evenly spaced, microscopic droplets of tin, then hits them twice each with a powerful laser. The collision produces an ultraviolet light with a wavelength thousands of times narrower than a human hair.
"The technology that's there in Oregon makes the Mars rover seem trivial," said Dan Hutcheson, chief executive of VLSI Research, a semiconductor industry market research firm.
Scientists and engineers conceived of EUV back in the 1980s, dreaming of a way to enable even smaller features on computer chips to squeeze out more performance while continuing to make them more efficient.
This is Moore's Law, the maxim coined by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that predicts exponential advances in computing power. But the pace of advancement has slowed in recent years, due in part because EUV's arrival comes more than a decade behind schedule.
Lithography is an essential step in the semiconductor manufacturing process. Chipmakers project ultraviolet light onto photosensitive material on silicon wafers to create a pattern, then etch away the material that isn't exposed to the light. The result is a pathway for a computer chip's electronic circuitry.
Smaller features on computer chips generally mean better, more efficient performance. But the wavelengths of light produced by existing lithography tools are too wide for the pathways chipmakers want to create.
Chipmakers have anticipated the need for a new class of lithography technology for more than two decades but struggled to produce the power and reliability the tools require. At times, industry watchers began to doubt EUV's viability.
"ASML takes big risks in these technologies and yes, it was never a guarantee," said Ted Paxton, ASML's EUV installation and upgrade manager in the U.S.
Waiting for EUV, a technology that long seemed just out of reach, chipmakers devised workarounds. They created immersion lithography, which used water to refract light to enable narrower wavelengths. And chipmakers would run wafers through the lithography process repeatedly to add tiny features they couldn't get with a single pass.
Those tricks added complexity, cost and time to the manufacturing process, though, and still didn't provide the precision the semiconductor industry had counted on EUV to provide.
Breakthroughs have come over the past few years, as ASML found ways to increase the power running through its EUV tools. That enabled more ultraviolet light, which in turn improved the machines' productivity.
There were 15 EUV systems in chip factories around the world at the end of 2016, on hand for researchers to begin experimenting and planning for full-scale production. Now, with EUV's credentials firmly established, ASML has a backlog of orders worth $2.7 billion.
The company expects to ship 20 tools next year and another 30 in 2019. The value of the company's shares has climbed by more than 60 percent this year.
That's created another challenge for ASML: installation.
The tool consists of 100,000 parts, 3,000 cables, 40,000 bolts and more than a mile of hosing. While the machine that sits inside the factory is the size of a bus, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the floor, it's supported by a huge apparatus that provides power, ventilation and other resources.
ASML said the company and its customers spend a year and a half planning for installation, preparing plumbing and electricity and building a giant crane inside a factory's clean room to lift components that weigh as much as 20,000 pounds.
"You're making something so big to make something that's smaller than a virus," Paxton said.
In two phases, beginning in 2010, Intel spent billions of dollars building a massive Hillsboro factory called D1X specifically to accommodate the larger dimensions EUV requires. It's the company's most advanced facility anywhere and where the chipmaker will pioneer successive generations of chip technology.
Intel won't specify just how or when it plans to employ EUV. After years of publicly lamenting slow development of the technology, though, Intel now hails "great progress."
"We are committed to bringing EUV into production as soon as the technology is ready at an effective cost," the company said in a written statement. "Intel continues to invest in readiness for EUV and is in a position to take full advantage of the technology as it matures."
Light from conventional lithography tools has a wavelength of 193 nanometers. That's inconceivably small - a human red blood cell measures 6,000 nanometers. Yet it's still much larger than the smallest features on cutting edge computer chips.
So EUV, with a wavelength of just 13.5 nanometers, represents a crucial leap for the industry.
"These tools have the ability to manipulate one layer on top of another to an almost molecular degree," said Hutcheson, the VLSI researcher.
Having followed EUV's development since the '80s, Hutcheson said the technology always seemed just out of reach. The semiconductor market underestimated the number of scientific breakthroughs it required.
Now that EUV is at last in reach, Hutcheson said the high-powered industrial lasers at the heart of the technology still feel like something out of science fiction.
"The tech industry, its reputation is it moves really fast and adopts technology really quickly," he said. "When you're in the middle of it, like me, it's like watching grass grow."
By Mike Rogoway
mrogoway@oregonian.com
The Oregonian/OregonLive
Updated Nov 26, 2017; Posted Nov 26, 2017