Name: 半導體（Why The World Relies On ASML For Machines That Print Chips）
Uploaded: 2022-03-27T07:40:51.000Z
Duration: 18 min 40 s
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At the center of this big factory in the Netherlands, in the midst of a months-long assembly process, there's a revolutionary machine that the

You can see an EUV machine right behind me.

The size of a city bus, but working with atomic level precision, these EUV lithography machines are the most expensive step in making every advanced

microchip that powers the modern digital age: data centers, cars and every single iPhone.

We are the only provider on the planet of this critical technology.

These machines are the only way to print miniscule designs on these chips. They cost up to $200 million. And they're only made by a single company:

Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography, or ASML.

Today, ASML has a monopoly on the fabrication of EUV lithography machines, the most advanced type of lithography equipment that's needed to make every

single advanced processor chip that we use today. And this company is one of the most extraordinary organizations in the world. The machines that

they produce, each one of them is among the most complicated devices ever made.

In the midst of a chip shortage that's caused backorders of everything from PS5s to Teslas, the need for ASML has never been higher. Its stock has

skyrocketed since 2018. While it's three main customers, chipmakers TSMC, Intel and Samsung vie to be front-of-line for ASML's next breakthrough

technology. The price tag for this next machine, which promises to push the boundaries of known physics, is more than $300 million.

It's so expensive that most companies cannot afford it.

While the chip was rage on, we wanted to find out what's really going on inside the quiet company making the machines that print them all.

This is the optical part of the machine that makes EUV possible.

We got a rare tour inside ASML's cleanrooms in California and the Netherlands to see how these machines use precision lasers, exploding

molten tin, and the smoothest surface in the world to bring our digital age to life.

ASML's crucial role on the chipmaking stage has brought it wild success over the past few years, making it even more valuable today than Intel, one

It's double digit growth every year. We're not a startup. No, we have now 32,000 people.

Peter Wennink has been CEO since 2013. But he joined ASML back in 1999, just 15 years after its humble beginnings. It started as a subsidiary of

Dutch electronics giant Philips in 1984, conducting research out of a leaky shed next to a Philips office building in Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

They were in financial dire straits, so we had no money. We were poor. And because the problems Philips had were so big, nobody looked at this little

outfit out there that was trying to do something crazy, so they neglected us.

Still, in its first year, the company successfully launched a first-of-its-kind machine that used precise rays of light to print tiny

designs on silicon to make microchips, a technology known as lithography.

The first lithography tool really looked like a projector. There is basically a reticle, which holds the image that you want to project, then

there is an optical system, which is going to take this image and project it on the wafer.

Semiconductor lithography was invented in a U.S. military lab and for a long time, up through the 1980s, the key lithography firms were American,

Chris Miller of Tufts University is writing a book called, "The Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology."

When the industry was getting ready to jump into the early stages of EUV research, none of the U.S. firms were ready to take the plunge on what

would be an expensive and risky proposition, whereas ASML was.

By 1988, ASML had five U.S. offices with 84 employees and a new Dutch office that eventually became its headquarters in Veldhoven, where CNBC

We're walking through the EUV factory, which is about 50,000 square meters of space with 1,500 employees, who are working in shifts seven by 24 to

produce 100% of the EUV machines shipped worldwide from this facility.

With a breakthrough machine, ASML started turning a profit and went public on the Amsterdam and New York Stock Exchange in 1995. By the 2000s ASML was

acquiring California tech companies like Silicon Valley Group, and various key suppliers like Cymer in San Diego, where we also got an inside look at

the cleanroom where ASML's light source is produced.

So this is actually the nozzle manufacturing area where we actually build the nozzles. This is actually the piece where the tin shoots out of. That's

EUV refers to extreme ultraviolet, an incredibly short wavelength of light that ASML uses to print smaller, more complex chips. But developing this

revolutionary technology was incredibly expensive.

We didn't have the money. So we went out and we found partners, which actually was the basis of the way that we built the company. So we were

forced to be a system architect and a system integrator.

In 2012, ASML offered about a quarter of its shares to its biggest three customers: Intel, Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., or

They had to accelerate the r&d for EUV and the only way they could do this is to get their largest customers involved. And one way you can make your

commitment real is to make them a shareholder.

ASML is a Dutch company, but it's also a Dutch company that relies very heavily on U.S. components, in particular for its machines, and at this

point, relies also very heavily on one Taiwanese customer for its sales.

TSMC made up nearly 40% of ASML's sales last year. In 2019. The Taiwanese chipmaker was the first to deliver high volume chips made with EUV, a

milestone that's kept it at the head of the pack ever since, its chip technology at least one node ahead of Samsung and Intel.

And it has been TSMC's customers that have gained a lot of benefit, like AMD, Nvidia and others. And yeah, you can argue that this has come at the

Intel is just now producing its first chips with EUV this year, three years behind TSMC. But it's made a bold move in hopes of catching up: an early

investment to secure the first prototype of ASML's next machine, High Numerical Aperture. To understand why the success of a giant like Intel

hinges on ASML, let's take a look at how EUV lithography revolutionized chipmaking.

When you start breaking down, what does it take to make an EUV lithography machine it's sort of Nobel Prize winning in terms of the engineering

Chips are made from silicone, an abundant element found in rocks and sand, that's purified, melted down, then sliced into circular wafers, the surface

on which chips are built in a grid formation. Each wafer can have dozens of thin layers, making up billions of transistors that determine what the

chips can do. These layers are printed using lithography. Extremely precise rays of light are projected through a mask of the chip design. When the

light hits the surface of the wafers, which have been coated with photoresist chemicals, it prints the minuscule designs on each layer at

If you think of a typical processor chip in an iPhone, for example, will have over 10 billion transistors on a chip and Apple will sell 100 million

or more iPhones for each model that's rolled out. So you're already talking in numbers that are far bigger than you or I remember how to pronounce.

As the wavelength of the light source in making chips gets narrower and narrower. It gives us the ability to make chips with smaller features,

which means the chip is faster, the chip can be smaller, the power consumption of the chip can be lower.

The smallest transistors are more than 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. The designs have gotten so small ASML had to develop new methods of

printing at the very edge of known physics. With the help of customer investments and a consortium of scientists, ASML figured out a way to

create large amounts of extreme ultraviolet light with a wavelength so short, it's not only invisible to the human eye, it's absorbed by all

natural substances, even air, so the entire process has to happen in a vacuum, a first for lithography. At 13.5 nanometers, ASML's EUV wavelength

is the size of just five DNA strands lead side-by-side. The previous generation machines used deep ultraviolet light, or DUV, with a wavelength

of 193 nanometers. The vast majority of ASML's business 268 of the 309 machines sold in 2021, still use DUV technology which is used to print the

less advanced chips which are in shortest supply.

DUV is for anything that is low technology like a toaster, or refrigerator, or even some of the electronics in your car. Today's iPhone 13 is EUV.

Both DUV and EUV lithography is so advanced, it requires precision down to the atom.

This is an EUV cabin of our cleanroom, which is 10,000 times cleaner than the outside air. We're wearing this clothing not to protect ourselves from

the environment, but we're protecting the machine from the contamination that's created by us.

This tiny threat may look like the strand of a spiderweb, but it's actually molten tin being shot out at a pressure of 4,000 psi. And it's how the EUV

This is continuous tin. It never ever, ever stops.

The tin is streaming through a perfectly calibrated nozzle which we saw being built in San Diego, at a rate of 50,000 droplets per second. A 30

kilowatt carbon dioxide laser hits each droplet twice per second, vaporizing them into plasma. These tiny explosions are what emit photons of

EUV light. A huge number of tin explosions need to happen because only about 5% of the photons reach the actual wafer. The light particles are so

short they get absorbed by mirrors, the typical method used to precisely aim light through a lens. So ASML partnered with German optics company

Zeiss, which makes the flattest surface in the world.

The flatness is really just incredible. If you took a mirror element that is maybe this big, and you blew it up to the size of the country that we're

in, the biggest bump would only be about one millimeter across the entire surface of a mirror the size of this country.

EUV light bounces off these groundbreaking Zeiss mirrors until it hits photoresist chemicals on the surface of the silicon wafer to print

miniscule designs that make up the chips. The aim needs to be so precise, TSMC says it's equivalent to shining a laser from the moon to hit a coin on

So your tin is inside a reservoir here, and then you're firing out this way.

Pete Mayol has been running this cleanroom for six years.

If any kind of defect particle whatsoever is even on the tip of that capillary, it's a fail. We'll remove and start all over again.

And the speed and scale at which this has to happen is staggering. ASML says an EUV machine churns out about 3,000 wafers a day. There can be