ASML, the world's leading lithography equipment manufacturer, announced that it has found a way to enhance the light source power of chip manufacturing equipment, which is expected to increase chip production by up to 50% by the end of 2030. 

This highlights that despite the desire of the United States and China to change ASML's near-monopoly, it still maintains a significant technological gap with its competitors. 

Not only is its largest customer TSMC the biggest beneficiary, but it is also good news for manufacturers of the two key AI chips, AI accelerators and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) that are eager to achieve greater efficiency.

Light source power of lithography equipment

ASML researchers have discovered a method to increase the power of the light source in the world's most advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment from the current 600 watts to 1 kilowatt. The biggest advantage is that the stronger the light source, the more chips can be produced per hour, helping to reduce the cost per chip. 

Chip printing is similar to photography, using EUV light to illuminate silicon wafers coated with photoresist; the stronger the light source, the shorter the chip exposure time.

The reason ASML's announcement has shaken the semiconductor market is that increasing the EUV light source output power can improve the efficiency of EUV wafer production from approximately 220 wafers per hour to 330 wafers per hour.

Currently, the most expensive EUV equipment costs between US$300 million and US$400 million (approximately NT$9.4 billion to NT$12.5 billion). 

Wafer fabs buy these machines to produce more efficient chips, but why spend so much money on such expensive equipment? The reason is that chip design is becoming more and more complex. Hundreds of billions or even hundreds of billions of transistors need to be placed in the same area, meaning that the linewidth exposed on the silicon wafer is becoming smaller and smaller, and traditional light sources can no longer "draw" it.

About EUV

EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) technology aims to make the internal circuitry of chips finer and shorten exposure time more quickly. The specially designed lithography equipment uses a wavelength only 13.5 nanometers shorter than deep ultraviolet (DUV) light, just one-fourteenth the wavelength of DUV, while significantly improving resolution.

The exposure principle of EUV utilizes an extremely high-intensity laser light source. A laser amplifier forms a laser beam that strikes a droplet of tin about one-third the width of a human hair at a rate of 50,000 times per second, generating EUV light. 

This light is then guided onto the wafer to be exposed by a precise array of mirrors.

ASML announced that by increasing the power of the light source in key chip manufacturing equipment, it expects to increase chip production by up to 50% by the end of 2030. This will undoubtedly allow TSMC, Samsung, Intel, SK Hynix, and Micron, which currently produce these crucial AI chips, to increase the production of these important AI chips and memory on their existing EUV production systems, making a decisive contribution to the semiconductor industry's rapid development of AI from the cloud to the edge.

From another perspective, ASML holds a near-monopoly in the advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment market. In this AI race, more and more countries are vying for this cutting-edge equipment, and even hoping to overturn ASML's monopoly.

The United States has also invested in and supported companies developing EUV lithography technologies, such as Substrate and Xlight, to potentially replace ASML's dominance. While these US- and Chinese-backed companies haven't yet threatened ASML, they have spurred ASML to accelerate its technological advancements. In the future, as AI becomes ubiquitous, more powerful manufacturing equipment will be needed to produce more robust AI chips.

Source: Commercial Times

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