Intel is knocking on ASML’s door to purchase advanced machines with which the chip specialist plans to build its next generation of processors.
Intel is eager to buy the first next-generation chip production machines from Dutch company ASML. These are EUV wavelength photolithography machines. Specifically, Intel is the first in the industry to buy some copies of the Twinscan EXE:5200. That device will cost about $340 million each and should be delivered in 2024.
Photolithography?
Photolithography is the cornerstone of chip manufacturing. Light is used to irradiate chemicals on a wafer in a fine pattern. Layer by layer, this creates the building blocks of microchips, with transistors and interconnects.
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Today, individual components of chips are so small that the wavelength of visible light is unusable. After all, it is too large. Imagine Rubens who would paint with a mural brush instead of a fine brush. In chip production, that fine brush is invisible extreme UV light (EUV).
Such light presents very significant challenges. Among other things, it is absorbed very quickly, even by extremely high-quality mirrors, so it is not easy to build machines that allow you to work with the radiation. ASML in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, is the only manufacturer in the world that builds photolithography machines of this level.
2 nm production
Intel hopes to put the new devices into production in 2025. The things will then become an indispensable part of a yet-to-be-built production line of the so-called Intel 20A production line. Under that name, Intel is plugging its future 2nm baking process.