ASML announced at imec’s ITF World 2024 conference that it has now set a new chipmaking density record with its first High-NA machine, surpassing a record it set just two months ago. ASML‘s former President and CTO, Martin van den Brink, who now serves in an advisory role at the company, also proposed that the company could develop a Hyper-NA chipmaking tool to deliver further scaling beyond its High-NA machine and shared potential roadmaps. He outlined a plan to reduce EUV chipmaking costs by radically boosting the speed of future ASML tools to 400 to 500 wafers per hour (wph), more than double the current peak of 200 wph. He proposed a modular unifying design for ASML’s future families of EUV tools as well.
Van der Brink said that, after further tuning, ASML has now printed 8nm dense lines with its pathfinding High-NA EUV machine—a density record for a machine designed for production environments. This beats the company’s own record it set in early April when it announced it had printed 10nm dense lines with its pathfinding High-NA machine located in its joint lab with imec at ASML's Veldhoven, Netherlands headquarters.
For perspective, ASML’s standard Low-NA EUV machines can print critical dimensions (CD—the smallest feature that can be printed) of 13.5nm, and the new High-NA EXE:5200 EUV tool is designed to create even smaller transistors by printing 8nm features. As such, ASML has now demonstrated that its machine can meet its basic specifications.
