ASML Ships Trade’s First Excessive-NA EUV Litho Scanner To Intel

ASML on Thursday said that it had shipped its pilot Excessive-NA EUV scanner to Intel. The Twinscan EXE:5000 excessive ultraviolet (EUV) scanner is AMSL’s very first Excessive-NA scanner, and it has eagerly been awaited by Intel, who first positioned an order for the machine again in 2018. Intel will likely be utilizing the brand new machine to experiment with Excessive-NA EUV earlier than it deploys business grade Twinscan EXE:5200 software for high-volume manufacturing (HVM) someday in 2025. The announcement represents a significant trade milestone that can have an effect not solely on Intel, however finally on the opposite modern fabs as properly.

“We’re transport the primary Excessive NA system and introduced this in a social media put up immediately,” a spokesperson for ASML mentioned. “It goes to Intel as deliberate and introduced earlier.”

The ASML Twinscan EXE Excessive-NA scanner is ready to make its journey from Veldhoven within the Netherlands all the way in which to Intel’s facility close to Hillsboro, Oregon, the place the software, jokingly referred to by Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger as Dr. Ann Kelleher’s Christmas current, will likely be put in within the coming months. It’s fairly a colossal piece of kit – so giant, actually, that it requires 13 truck-sized containers and 250 crates simply to move it. And as soon as assembled, the machine is 3 tales tall, which has required Intel to construct a brand new (and taller) fab enlargement simply to accommodate it. It’s estimated that every of those Excessive-NA EUV scanners comes with a hefty price ticket, seemingly within the vary between $300 million and $400 million.

Excessive numerical aperture (Excessive-NA) EUV lithography instruments that includes a 0.55 NA lens are able to an 8nm decision, which is a major enchancment in comparison with present EUV instruments with a 13nm decision. These next-generation Excessive-NA EUV scanners are anticipated to be necessary for chip manufacturing utilizing course of applied sciences past 3nm, which the trade is ready to undertake in 2025 – 2026, as they’ll enable fabs to keep away from utilizing EUV double patterning, vastly decreasing complexity whereas probably enhancing yields and reducing prices.

However ASML’s Twinscan EXE lithography instruments with a 0.55 NA will likely be considerably completely different than the corporate’s common Twinscan NXE litho machines with a 0.33 NA. An avid reader will keep in mind from our previous reports that Excessive-NA scanners are going to be considerably greater than modern EUV scanners, which would require new fab buildings. However these is by far not the one distinction.

Maybe the most important change between the Excessive-NA and common EUV scanners is the halved reticle measurement of the Excessive-NA scanners, which would require chipmakers to rethink how they design and produce chips – particularly at a time when high-end GPUs and AI accelerators are pushing the bounds for reticle sizes. As well as, since Excessive-NA scanners will assist a better decision and completely different reticle measurement, they’ll require new photoresists, metrology, pellicle supplies, masks, and inspection instruments, simply to call a few of the alterations. Briefly, Excessive-NA instruments would require important investments in infrastructure to go together with them.

Though semiconductor manufacturing infrastructure is developed by the entire trade, one of the simplest ways to undertake it for real-world manufacturing is to tailor it for precise course of applied sciences and course of recipes. Which is why it’s so necessary to start out working with pilot scanners early to arrange for HVM utilizing manufacturing machines.

Intel was the primary firm to order ASML’s pilot Twinscan EXE:5000 scanner again in 2018. It was additionally the primary to position an order for ASML’s business grade Twinscan EXE:5200 litho software in 2022. The corporate is ready to start out development work on its 18A node (18 angstroms, 1.8nm) in 2024 after which will make use of Excessive-NA instruments for a post-18A node, presumably in 2025 – 2026.

By getting Excessive-NA instruments sooner than its rivals, Intel not solely be capable of be certain that its instruments produce desired outcomes, nevertheless it has an opportunity to set the requirements for the trade in relation to Excessive-NA manufacturing. For Intel this may imply getting a major benefit over its rivals, Samsung Foundry and TSMC.

ASML introduced in 2022 that it is going to be capable of produce 20 Excessive-NA EUV litho instruments per 12 months in 2027 – 2028. In the meantime, the corporate disclosed earlier this 12 months is that it had a double-digit variety of machines in its Excessive-NA backlog, which indicators that its companions are set to undertake these scanners within the coming years. And main that pack will likely be Intel.