ASML is the world's only maker of EUV lithography, the machines needed to build the most powerful AI accelerators. The company brought the simpler Low-NA version to market in 2019 and has since worked with customers to roll out the more complex High-NA systems.
Bigger photomasks aim to boost throughput by 40 percent
The deal hinges on a small but critical shift in technology. The four companies plan to move their photomasks from today's six-inch standard to twelve inches. A photomask is a kind of stencil that holds a chip's circuit pattern. In lithography, light passes through this mask onto a silicon wafer coated with light-sensitive material, transferring the pattern onto the wafer, where transistors and circuit paths are then formed.
The bigger the mask, the more area you can image in a single exposure. Because the six-inch limit capped the size of a single chip, manufacturers had to stack chips vertically and connect them in complex ways, which drove up cost and complexity.
The switch has long been seen as complicated and expensive. But the coordinated push could raise the throughput of High-NA machines by 40 percent and simplify the design process, according to ASML technology chief Marco Pieters, who called it a huge opportunity. TSMC and ASML plan to build a test line for twelve-inch masks by 2031, with production use on High-NA tools set for 2033.
