ASML to work with major chipmakers to use latest tools for larger chips

Reported from San Francisco on September 7 (Reuters) - ASML, the Dutch maker of chip manufacturing equipment, announced that it will collaborate with its primary customers to develop its most advanced tools, focusing on the large data-center chips designed by Nvidia and other companies.

ASML produces lithography systems, which imprint chip designs onto silicon wafers by projecting light through a patterned mask that carries the circuit layout.

The company’s widely adopted extreme ultraviolet (EUV) tools are capable of printing chips up to roughly 800 square millimeters, and chip designers such as Nvidia, Google, and others build chips that reach that maximum size.

ASML's next-generation systems, called High-NA EUV tools, can pattern chips with even finer features, but they currently have a limit on the largest chip size they can produce because they rely on a smaller mask.

Intel has already adopted ASML's newest tools for its laptop processors, but ASML said this week that it plans to move to a larger mask size, which would allow its latest machines to create chips as large as today's biggest data-center processors.

Switching the new High-NA machines to larger masks is intended to promote broader deployment in high-volume manufacturing. The tools are presently used in production only at Intel, while Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and Samsung Electronics have not yet adopted them for substantial output.

Separately, SK Hynix said in a statement that it is assessing whether to join a consortium related to the introduction of 12-inch masks, and that it is aiming to apply High-NA EUV processes to DRAM mass production by 2028.

TSMC said this week it intends to use ASML’s High-NA technology in advanced-node high-volume production from 2030, while Samsung plans to bring High-NA EUV into high-volume DRAM memory chip manufacturing by 2028.

ASML expects to demonstrate a pilot line using the larger masks by 2031 and to have the new technology ready for high-volume manufacturing by 2033.

"If we're going to pull it off as an industry, then you'll actually see that the productivity of those systems will go up by 40%," Marco Pieters, ASML’s chief technology officer, told Reuters.