Modern technology runs on objects too small to be seen, yet too complex to fully comprehend at a glance. Inside every smartphone, computer, and data centre lies a microchip—an engineered landscape where billions of transistors switch at unimaginable speeds, shaping the digital world. What looks like a flat piece of silicon is, in reality, a layered nanoscopic city, built with atomic precision and governed by the laws of light, heat, and quantum-scale physics.
For more than half a century, the power of these chips grew predictably as transistors kept shrinking, a trend famously known as Moore’s Law. That steady march of progress fueled faster computers, smarter devices, and the modern internet itself. But as the industry approached physical limits, the rules that once worked began to fail. Light refused to behave, materials absorbed energy, and the smallest errors became catastrophic. By the mid-2010s, it appeared that the era of effortless scaling was over.
This is the story of how that wall was breached—not through incremental improvement, but through one of the most ambitious engineering feats ever attempted. At the center of it lies an almost surreal machine that creates miniature stars, manipulates light no human eye can see, and aligns chip layers with accuracy measured in atoms. This machine didn’t just extend Moore’s Law—it redefined what was considered physically possible.
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| Inside The Microchip : Only For Representation Purpose |
This is a microchip. Zoom in closely, and it transforms into a nanoscopic city of computing marvels—towering skyscrapers of circuits, hundreds of layers high, intertwined with hundreds of kilometres of connecting wires. At the very foundation lie the transistors, billions of them, encoding the ones and zeros that drive computation. The chip operates by shuttling electrons from transistor to transistor. Shrinking these transistors reduces the distance the electrons must travel, accelerating processing speed, while packing more transistors into the same area exponentially boosts the chip's power.
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For over fifty years, transistor sizes shrank relentlessly, and the number of transistors on a chip doubled approximately every two years—a phenomenon immortalised as Moore’s Law, after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed the trend in 1965. This principle fueled decades of technological advancement until around 2015, when progress stalled, seemingly hitting a brick wall. But a single company, crafting machines of unparalleled complexity, became the unlikely savior of Moore’s Law.
This machine is humanity’s most intricate commercial creation. It costs nearly $400 million, and its operation is almost unimaginable. Picture being shrunk to the size of an ant, armed with a laser capable of slicing through metal effortlessly. A microscopic droplet of molten tin, the size of a white blood cell, hurtles past at 250 kilometers per hour. The task: strike it precisely three times in twenty microseconds. This is exactly what the machine achieves—heating each droplet to over 220,000 Kelvin, roughly forty times the surface temperature of the Sun. It repeats this feat for 50,000 droplets every second, with absolute precision.
The machine’s mirrors rank among the smoothest objects ever constructed; if scaled to the size of the Earth, the largest bump would be no thicker than a playing card. Layer upon layer of chips is overlaid with an accuracy of no more than five atoms, all while components accelerate at over 20 g’s. For three decades, building such a device was deemed impossible. Yet it exists, and only one company has mastered its creation.
The process of making a microchip begins with silicon dioxide, typically sourced from sand, purified into nearly 100% pure silicon. These chunks are melted in a specialised furnace, and a seed crystal is lowered into the molten silicon. Silicon atoms attach to the seed as it is slowly lifted and rotated, forming a large single-crystal silicon ingot. The ingot is then sliced into wafers with diamond wire saws, polished meticulously, and coated with a light-sensitive material called photoresist. Light shines through a patterned mask, weakening the exposed areas, which are then washed away. The resulting pattern is etched into the silicon using chemicals or plasma and filled with metal to form circuits. This cycle—coat, expose, etch, deposit—is repeated for every chip layer, sometimes up to a hundred times, creating transistors at the base and metal wiring layers above.
The most crucial step is photolithography, where light is projected through the mask onto the wafer. As feature sizes shrink, gaps in the mask approach the wavelength of light, producing diffraction. Instead of combating it, engineers harness diffraction to create the desired patterns. The smallest features achievable are determined by the Rayleigh equation, governed by the wavelength of light and the numerical aperture of the lens system.
By the late 1990s, deep UV light at 193 nanometers had pushed photolithography to its limits. Scientists needed shorter wavelengths, and x-rays became a radical solution. Yet x-rays interact strongly with air and materials, making lenses ineffective. The breakthrough came with multilayer mirrors, alternating tungsten and carbon, capable of reflecting x-rays efficiently. These mirrors had to be atomically smooth, with average surface bumps just a few atoms high, to prevent scattering.
Through decades of experimentation, extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) emerged. The technology faced immense hurdles: generating sufficient EUV light, shaping tin droplets precisely, and managing the heat and debris from plasma events. Tiny droplets of molten tin were created at high frequency, flattened by initial laser pulses, then vaporized to produce EUV light. Hydrogen gas within the chamber protected the mirrors, and later, carefully controlled oxygen further extended their lifespan.
ASML, a small company from the Netherlands, became the sole master of this technology. Partnering with Zeiss for mirror fabrication, ASML refined the light source, laser pulses, and optics to create commercially viable machines. Low numerical aperture (NA) machines could print 13-nanometer features, while high NA machines, the next generation, pushed even smaller. The machines operate in ultra-clean rooms, with fewer than ten particles per cubic meter—a purity orders of magnitude beyond hospital operating rooms.
Every detail is engineered with unimaginable precision: reticles accelerate at over 20 g’s, layer alignment must stay within one nanometer, and laser pulses must strike droplets at precisely the right moment. Hundreds of wafers are printed per hour, and the machine runs continuously under extreme conditions. By 2016, ASML’s machines became the backbone of advanced chip production, arguably making the company one of the most crucial in the tech industry.
These EUV lithography systems represent the pinnacle of engineering: a dance of lasers, plasma, mirrors, and ultrafine mechanics, all synchronized to craft the fundamental building blocks of modern technology. The journey from molten silicon to nanometer-scale circuits embodies decades of ingenuity, pushing the limits of what humanity can manufacture with precision at the atomic level.
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