ASML's Triple-Laser EUV Tech Breakthrough Aims To Boost Chip Production By 50%

You know who ASML is, right? For those who are just joining us, ASML is the guys who make the tools that the TSMC and Intel and Samsung guys use to make their bleeding-edge chips. The Dutch company is the only firm in the world capable of commercializing Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV) lithography machines, which are absolutely vital to the production of chips with ludicrously small feature sizes. The company says it has created a new system that utilizes three separate laser bursts to apply up to 1000W of EUV power to the photoresist on a wafer, which in turn could allow it to increase wafer production by 50%.

So, lithography is etching things into stone; in this case, the stone is silicon. The way photolithography works is that you lay down a material called photoresist in dense patterns, and then you blast it with photons to "dose" the photoresist and ...