The first high-aperture scanner ships to Intel
In December 2023 ASML shipped Intel the first modules of the first High NA EUV system, the TWINSCAN EXE:5000. The numerical aperture rises from 0.33 to 0.55, giving a smallest printable dimension of 8 nanometres: features 1.7 times smaller and densities 2.9 times higher than with earlier EUV systems.
Why it matters
The node on which the next decade's accelerators will be printed depends on one machine from one company in one country, and the first such machine went to one customer. The atlas shows export controls on dies; here is the link above them - the equipment without which there are no dies at all.
ASML puts what happened in December carefully: it "shipped the first modules of the first High NA EUV lithography system to Intel". Not a machine in a crate, and not a day: the system travelled in pieces, and Intel announced completed assembly and the start of calibration only on 18 April 2024, at Fab D1X in Hillsboro, Oregon. That is why this record carries a month rather than the 21 December the research report gave. ASML's figures: aperture from 0.33 to 0.55, a critical dimension of 8 nanometres, features 1.7 times smaller, densities 2.9 times higher. So that the industry need not move to larger reticles, the optics are anamorphic - demagnifying four times in one direction and eight in the other. The exposure field is half the size, so a wafer takes twice as many exposures; that is offset by faster stages, the wafer stage accelerating at 8g and the reticle stage at 32g. Throughput is more than 185 wafers an hour. Intel's figures: the system arrived "in more than 250 crates inside 43 freight containers", then cargo planes to Seattle and twenty trucks to Oregon; one system weighs more than 150 metric tons. What this record does not claim. Neither source gives a price, so the 350 million dollars from the research report does not enter. And the report's "more than 250 containers" transposes the figures: there were 43 containers and more than 250 crates.