ASML Investor Day takeaways: the future of EUV

If you boil down the chipmaking game to its economic essence, it’s about printing as many functional transistors (including their ‘on-chip infrastructure’) as possible at the lowest possible cost. From the simple fact that Moore’s Law exists, we can infer that the semiconductor industry at large has been very successful indeed at this game over the past decades. Can it continue to be in the future?

ASML certainly thinks so. At its 2024 Investor Day, held on 14 November in Veldhoven, the firm laid out the innovations it has in store to continue improving the number of good printed transistors per euro well into the next decade. Although all lithography (and non-lithography) tools will have to contribute to this goal, it’s EUV that will have to do most of the work. After all, as the youngest sibling in the semiconductor litho family, EUV still has the most room for improvement.