San Diego, California, Feb 23 - Engineers at ASML Holding report they have developed a method to increase the power of the light source used in commercial extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines to 1,000 watts from the current level of 600 watts. ASML said the change could allow the machines to produce up to 50% more chips by the end of the decade, helping the company maintain an edge over potential competitors in the United States and China.
ASML is the only company that manufactures commercial EUV systems, a class of lithography machines relied on by chipmakers including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Intel to produce advanced computing chips. The core technical challenge these systems address is generating EUV light with the necessary power and characteristics to print chips at volume.
In an interview at ASML’s California facilities near San Diego, Michael Purvis, the company’s lead technologist for its EUV source light, characterized the work as more than a laboratory demonstration. "It’s not a parlor trick or something like this, where we demonstrate for a very short time that it can work," he said. "It’s a system that can produce 1,000 watts under all the same requirements that you could see at a customer."
How higher source power translates to higher throughput
The immediate operational benefit ASML highlights from increasing EUV source power is reduced exposure time per chip. EUV lithography prints patterns onto silicon wafers coated with a light-sensitive material called photoresist; the brighter the EUV source, the quicker each exposure can be completed. Faster exposures mean a machine can print more chips per hour, which in turn lowers the cost per device.
Teun van Gogh, executive vice president for the NXE line of EUV machines at ASML, emphasized this economic impact. "We’d like to make sure that our customers can keep on using EUV at a much lower cost," he said. Van Gogh projected that by the end of the decade individual machines should be able to process about 330 silicon wafers an hour, up from roughly 220 wafers per hour today. Depending on chip die size, each wafer contains anywhere from scores to thousands of chips.
Technical approach behind the power increase
ASML’s EUV systems generate light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers by firing a stream of molten tin droplets into a chamber and heating them into plasma with a powerful carbon dioxide laser. In the plasma state the tin droplets become extremely hot and emit EUV radiation, which is collected by precision optics supplied by Carl Zeiss AG and directed into the lithography machine to print features on wafers.
To reach 1,000 watts, ASML said its researchers doubled the number of tin droplets produced to about 100,000 per second. They also changed the way the droplets are shaped into plasma, using two smaller laser bursts to form the plasma instead of a single shaping burst used by current machines. Those adjustments are the central innovations disclosed by the company on Monday.
Jorge J. Rocca, a laser technologies professor at Colorado State University who has trained several ASML scientists and whose lab focuses on laser-based light sources, described the achievement as technically demanding. "It’s very challenging, because you need to master many things, many technologies," he said. He added, "What was achieved - one kilowatt - is pretty amazing."
Purvis indicated the company believes the same techniques open pathways for further increases in EUV source power. "We see a reasonably clear path toward 1,500 watts, and no fundamental reason why we couldn’t get to 2,000 watts," he said.
Geopolitics, competition and strategic context
The strategic importance of EUV machines has prompted political action. Governments in the United States and the Netherlands have worked together to limit shipments of these systems to China, a step that has coincided with China pursuing a national effort to build its own lithography equipment. In the United States, at least two startups, Substrate and xLight, have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to try to develop domestic competitors to ASML’s technology. xLight has also secured government funding from the Trump administration.
ASML framed the disclosed technical advance as a way to outdistance would-be rivals by improving the most technologically demanding part of the machines: generating EUV light with the properties needed for high-volume chip production.
Market and operational implications
ASML’s account links the higher-power EUV source to meaningful increases in wafer throughput and lower per-chip costs for customers, outcomes that would affect semiconductor equipment suppliers, chipmakers, and downstream sectors that depend on advanced chips. By shortening exposure times, factories using the upgraded systems could produce substantially more chips per shift, improving unit economics for high-end semiconductor manufacturing.
Separately, tools that accelerate throughput can influence investment decisions at chip fabrication facilities because higher capacity per machine changes the marginal cost and return on new equipment deployments.
Valuation product mention in original reporting
The original reporting included a promotional note describing a Fair Value calculator that uses a mix of 17 industry valuation models to evaluate ASML and other stocks. That promotional copy presented the tool as a way to determine whether ASML is undervalued.
The technical details and statements presented here reflect ASML’s disclosures and comments made by company technologists and outside academics during discussions at the firm’s California facilities.