ASML's Extreme Ultraviolet Machine: Printing at 13.5 Nanometers

In Veldhoven, Netherlands, ASML’s EUV machine fires pulses of laser light that last just 10 trillionths of a second, each hitting molten tin droplets and bursting them into plasma hotter than the surface of the sun-so why would a chip company need a star’s heat in a box the size of a bus? Each plasma flash creates extreme ultraviolet light with a wavelength of just 13.5 nanometers, narrower than a strand of DNA, so ASML’s optics can etch transistor patterns smaller than any visible light system could ever hope for. But the lasers alone aren’t enough-lenses that work at those wavelengths simply don’t exist, so ASML engineers built mirrors coated in molybdenum and silicon, layered 40 times just to reflect that rare light without scattering it. Every single mirror is polished so smooth, any bump bigger than a few atoms would ruin the process. Still, there’s more: just transporting the EUV light through regular air would stop it cold, so the whole path needs to exist in a near-total vacuum. For every microchip from Apple’s M3 to NVIDIA’s H100, this rig allows manufacturers to squeeze over 100 billion transistors in a space no bigger than your thumbnail. But it all depends on ASML’s machine being able to focus that impossibly short wavelength, because without it, chipmaking would still be stuck at features three times larger, and phone processors would be both slower and hotter.