The Incredible Engineering of Chip Making Machines

Have a look at your phone. Ever wondered what’s in it?

The answer: billions of integrated circuits consisting of many subcomponents working together to make your phone “just work.”

Computers (including our phones) are just pieces of sand, silicon, and several raw materials engineered in such a way until it is able to perform all the tasks you can do with phones today. There is no magic in our computers. But the engineering that goes into the process of creating them may very well be the closest thing to magic we have.

Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV) is a technology used to manufacture cutting-edge integrated circuits. Integrated circuits make our computers work. They utilize principles of mathematics and electronic engineering to allow higher-level functionality such as data processing and information storage to arise. EUV utilizes light to transfer a pattern into silicon, taking part in the first of many steps to produce a computer chip.

ASML, the Dutch company which is also one of the biggest chip-making equipment manufacturer, has recently publicized their $380 million, 150 ton EUV machine (shown in the picture above). It is capable of etching 8 nanometer wide-lines on semiconductors, achieving significant improvements over past generations. The Wall Street Journal referred to it as the “most indispensable machine in the world.”

ASML’s newest EUV machine is able to generate short wavelength EUV light by blasting suspended tin droplets using lasers by as much as 50 thousand times per second. These tin droplets are heated to temperatures hotter than the sun itself. Each machine is the result of 400,000 working components and decades of research and development efforts.

With the booming popularity of artificial intelligence in the 2020s, EUV machines such as ASML’s will play an ever important part in our future. These machines are so powerful that they are influencing geopolitics. They are so complex that even a highly capable person will need to invest decades of their lives to understand its intricacies.

So the next time you face a seemingly difficult problem, take a solid look at your phone and imagine the challenges of building such devices from sand and silicon. You might discover the tenacity of the engineers and builders that made such device to work, and that might inspire you to maybe push a little harder to crack whatever problem you have in front of you.