ASML Holding’s next-generation chipmaking machine is ready for manufacturers to start bringing it into use for production at high volumes, a senior executive said — a big step for the chip industry.
The Dutch company produces the world’s only commercial extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) tools, which are a critical piece of equipment for chipmakers.
The new tool would help chipmakers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) and Intel produce more powerful and efficient chips by eliminating several costly and complex steps from the chip-manufacturing process, ASML data showed.
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ASML planned to release the data, which represents a key milestone, at a technical conference in San Jose, California, on Thursday, company chief technology officer Marco Pieters said on Wednesday.
It has taken ASML years to develop the next-generation tools, as chipmakers have attempted to determine at what point it makes economic sense to begin to use them for mass production.
However, given that the current generation of EUV tools is approaching the technical limit of their ability to make complex artificial intelligence (AI) chips, the next-generation machines — called High-NA EUV tools — are key for the AI industry to improve chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and help chipmakers deliver their AI chip road maps on time to meet surging demand.
The new tools cost about US$400 million, twice the cost of the original EUV machines.
The High-NA EUV tools now experience limited downtime, have produced 500,000 dinner-plate-sized silicon wafers and can draw sufficiently precise patterns that make up the circuits on the chip, the ASML data showed.
In combination, the three data points indicate the tools are ready for manufacturers.
“I think that it’s at a critical point to look at the amount of learning cycles that have happened,” Pieters said, referring to the number of tests that have been conducted on the machines by customers.
Despite their technical readiness, it would take two to three years for companies to conduct enough testing and development to integrate them into manufacturing.
Chipmakers “have all the knowledge to qualify these tools,” Pieters said.
The company has achieved about 80 percent uptime at the moment and plans to achieve 90 percent by the end of the year, he added.
The imaging data ASML was to release are enough to convince customers to replace multiple steps with the older-generation tools with a single High-NA step, Pieters said.
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