EUV Lithography Systems
The single-supplier machine that patterns every leading-edge chip, using 13.5nm light generated by vaporising tin droplets with a laser.
The front-end tools that pattern and build the device layers.
The most concentrated segment of the entire chain. A handful of firms across four countries supply essentially all of it, which is what makes export controls on this vertical so effective.
The single-supplier machine that patterns every leading-edge chip, using 13.5nm light generated by vaporising tin droplets with a laser.
Argon fluoride, krypton fluoride and i-line systems that pattern everything from 7nm down-rev layers to the mature nodes India is actually building.
The system that spins resist onto the wafer, bakes it, hands it to the scanner and develops it afterwards. Physically bolted to the scanner and sold as a pair.
Reactors that remove material with chemically reactive plasma, translating the pattern in the resist into the actual structure of the device.
Single-wafer and batch systems that strip particles, organics and metal contamination between every other process step. A wafer is cleaned dozens of times.
Particle accelerators that fire dopant ions into the silicon lattice at controlled energy and dose, defining where the device conducts and where it does not.
Vertical batch furnaces and single-wafer rapid thermal systems that oxidise, anneal and activate dopants at temperatures up to 1,100 degrees.
Reactors that grow dielectric and metal films from gas-phase precursors: chemical vapour deposition in bulk, atomic layer deposition one monolayer at a time.
Vacuum systems that deposit metal films by knocking atoms off a solid target with plasma, how the copper, titanium and tantalum layers get onto the wafer.
Tools that flatten the wafer between layers by polishing it against a pad with an abrasive slurry, the process that makes multi-layer wiring possible.
The tools that measure whether every other tool did its job: critical dimensions, overlay, film thickness and the defects nobody intended to make.
The robots, front-end modules, carriers and overhead transport that move wafers between tools without a human ever touching one.