Keep pulling the thread on Moore's Law.
The trend of transistor density on microchips doubling every two years, known as Moore's Law, significantly slowed down around 2015.
ASML's most advanced EUV lithography machine costs approximately $400 million.
ASML's EUV lithography machine can overlay chip layers with a precision of five atoms.
Intel, Motorola, and AMD collectively invested $250 million to continue EUV lithography research, which was the largest private industry investment in a Department of Energy research project at the time.
Using tin as a target material for laser-produced plasma provides a 5 to 10 times higher conversion efficiency for 13.5 nanometer EUV light compared to xenon.
Zeiss developed an active optics system for ASML's EUV machines with robot-guided sensors that measure and correct mirror positions and angles with nanometer and picoradian precision.
To fund continued EUV development, Intel invested approximately $4.1 billion in ASML, while Samsung and TSMC invested a combined $1.3 billion.
A major breakthrough for ASML's EUV source power was a dual-pulse laser technique, where a pre-pulse flattens the tin droplet before a main pulse vaporizes it into plasma.
ASML achieved a 100-watt EUV light source in 2014 using the dual-pulse laser technique.
ASML's first generation of commercial EUV machines (Low-NA) have a numerical aperture of 0.33 and can print features as small as 13 nanometers.
ASML's next-generation High-NA EUV machines feature a numerical aperture of 0.55.
ASML's High-NA EUV lithography machine is priced at over 350 million euros.