Compared to the transition from immersion to EUV lithography, moving from low-NA to high-NA should be easy. Right?
High-NA EUV lithography is entering a new phase. At the end of May, ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet announced that the first chips manufactured with high-NA would be unveiled “within months,” implying that the major hurdles to deploying the technology in production have largely been cleared. The next step is to set up manufacturing environments, ramp production and fine-tune processes to maximize yield. That journey toward volume manufacturing is still expected to take another year or two, by the way.
According to Geert Vandenberghe, vice president of patterning at Imec, the fact that the first high-NA chips are already within reach is far from a given. “The joint High-NA Lab of ASML and Imec opened in early 2024. That marked the start of an extensive co-optimization effort involving the scanner, resist, mask and numerous other process elements. The fact that we’re already talking about real chips is a remarkable feat.”
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