ASML to work with major chipmakers to use latest tools for larger chips

By Stephen Nellis

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 7 (Reuters) - ASML, the Dutch chip manufacturing tool company, said it plans to work together with its major customers to produce its most advanced tools for developing the kind of large data center chips designed by Nvidia and others.

ASML makes what are known as lithography tools, which print chips onto silicon wafers by shining light through what is known as a mask, which contains the pattern of the chip.

The company's widely used extreme ultraviolet (EUV) tools can print a chip that is up to about 800 square millimeters, and companies such as Nvidia, Google and others design chips all the way up to that limit.

ASML's forthcoming generation of tools, called "High NA" EUV tools, can print chips with even finer features, but currently face a limit on how big of a chip they can print because they use a smaller mask.

While Intel is already using ASML's newest tools for its laptop chips, ASML said this week it plans to move up to a larger mask size that would let its newest tools make chips as large as today's biggest data center chips.

Moving to larger masks for the new High NA machines will help spur wider use for high-volume production with the new machines, which are currently used for production at Intel but are not yet used for high-volume work at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing or Samsung Electronics.

Separately, SK Hynix said in a statement that the company is evaluating participating in the consortium regarding the introduction of 12-inch masks, adding that it is targeting 2028 to apply High-NA EUV processes to DRAM mass production.

TSMC said this week it plans to use ASML's High NA technology in advanced-node high-volume production from 2030, while Samsung plans to introduce High NA EUV into DRAM memory chip high-volume production by 2028.

ASML plans to show a pilot line with the larger masks by 2031 and have the new technology ready for high volume production by 2033.

"If we're going to pull it off as an industry, then you'll actually see that the productivity of those systems will go up by 40%," Marco Pieters, ASML's chief technology officer, told Reuters.

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)