ASML has secured commitments from TSMC, Samsung, and Intel to adopt its High-NA EUV lithography machines.

According to a report from Bloomberg, Samsung plans to use the Dutch company's High-NA EUV lithography machines for high-volume manufacturing starting in 2028, and TSMC in 2030. Both join Intel, which already has the machines running.

A single unit costs up to $400 million.

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 switch has long been seen as complicated and expensive," said Marco Pieters, ASML technology chief. "But the coordinated push could raise the throughput of High-NA machines by 40 percent and simplify the design process."

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. TSMC had been cautious until now, arguing that the productivity gains didn't yet justify the higher costs.

Now the company is reversing course. That matters for ASML, since TSMC accounts for about 16 percent of its revenue.

Meanwhile, Huawei is pushing to strip foreign technology out of China's semiconductor supply chain and work around Western export controls that cover ASML's valuable technology.

According to a report from the Financial Times, the company is investing across the entire lithography chain and helping broker deals with leading fabs like SMIC. China isn't focused on the most advanced EUV technology, but on DUV.

Source: thedecoder