The Moore's Law Machine: The Next Trick to Tinier Transistors is High-Numerical-Aperture EUV Lithography

Over the last half-century, we've come to think of Moore's Law—the roughly biennial doubling of the number of transistors in a given area of silicon, the gains that drive computing forward—as something that just happens, as though it were a natural, inevitable process, akin to evolution or aging. The reality, of course, is much different. Keeping pace with Moore's Law requires almost unimaginable expenditures of time, energy, and human ingenuity—thousands of people on multiple continents and endless acres of some of the most complex machinery on the planet. • Perhaps the most essential of these machines performs extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) photolithography. EUV lithography, the product of decades of R&D, is now the driving technology behind the past two generations of cutting-edge chips, used in every top-end smartphone, tablet, laptop, and server in the last three years. Yet Moore's Law must march on, and chipmakers continue to advance their road maps, meaning they'll need to shrink device geometries even further. • So at ASML, my colleagues and I are developing the next generation of lithography. Called high-numerical-aperture EUV lithography, it involves a major overhaul of the system's internal optics. High-NA EUV should be ready for commercial use in 2025, and chipmakers are depending on its capabilities to keep their promised advances through the end of this decade.