Chipzilla and ASML have shoved High-NA EUV into commercial production.
ASML and Intel Foundry said a subset of Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake processors is rolling off production lines.
According to ASML the chips are being made using the industry’s first commercial High-NA EUV scanner. For years, plenty of people wondered whether High-NA EUV was worth the bother.
The kit is expensive, awkward and about as forgiving as a tax inspector, but Chipzilla has shown it can work.
Lithography is the process of using light to print microscopic transistor designs onto silicon wafers. Extreme ultraviolet lithography changed the industry by using 13.5-nanometre light to print absurdly dense features.
Put crudely, chipmakers need a very sharp knife for very fine carving. In this case, that knife is ridiculously sharp, used for photolithography.
High-NA, short for high numerical aperture, is the next generation of that trick. Standard EUV machines use a lens system with a numerical aperture of 0.33.
High-NA pushes that to 0.55, which is like swapping a normal camera lens for one with a much wider aperture. It captures a wider cone of light and focuses it into a tighter point.
That lets chipmakers print features about 60 per cent the size of standard EUV in a single pass. Without High-NA, ultra-dense features need multi-patterning.
That means running a wafer through a standard EUV machine several times to etch one complex layer. Multi-patterning takes longer, increases defect risk and drives up costs.
High-NA can print those features in a single exposure and make production less of a faff. Core Ultra Series 3 chips have already been shipping to punters for months using mature standard EUV platforms.
This announcement is about dual qualification, which sounds boring until you realise what it means. Chipzilla has modified specific layers of its Panther Lake design to run on its experimental Twinscan EXE High-NA machine in Oregon.
Wafers processed on the $400 million machine have reached yields matching Chipzilla’s mature production platforms. Those chips are now shipping to customers.
For customers, nothing much changes yet because the chips perform the same. For ASML, this is a proper business win.
After years of scepticism about High-NA’s cost and complexity, the system has moved from research project to commercial tool. The Dutch lithography giant can now point at production silicon rather than another slide deck with tiny fonts.
