Exclusive-ASML says next-gen EUV tools ready to mass-produce chips, marking key shift for AI chip production  

SAN JOSE, California, Feb 26 (Reuters) – 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 told Reuters, 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. This new tool will help chipmakers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing  and Intel produce more powerful and efficient chips, by eliminating several costly and complex steps from the chip-manufacturing process, data from ASML shows.

ASML plans to release this data, which represents a key milestone, at a technical conference in San Jose on Thursday, the company’s chief technology officer, Marco Pieters, told Reuters on Wednesday.

It has taken ASML years to develop the costly, next-generation tools as chipmakers have attempted to determine at what point it makes economic sense to begin to use them for mass production.

But given that the current generation of EUV tools is approaching the technical limit of their ability to make complex AI chips, the next-generation machines – called High-NA EUV tools – are key for the AI industry to improve chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and help chipmakers deliver their AI chip roadmaps on time to meet surging demand.

The new tools cost roughly $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 shows, Pieters said. 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,” he said, referring to the number of tests that have been conducted on the machines by customers.

Despite their technical readiness, it will 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.

Pieters also said the company has achieved roughly 80% uptime at the moment and plans to achieve 90% by the end of the year. The imaging data ASML plans to release is enough to convince customers to replace multiple steps with the older-generation tools with a single High-NA step, Pieters said. The 500,000 wafers the machines have processed have allowed the company to work out many of the kinks.

(Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Matthew Lewis)