A new machine to power the future of semiconductor innovation

The computers powering our lives have become increasingly complex, requiring ever more powerful chips. For the last decade, the gold standard system for manufacturing chips has been EUV lithography machines built by ASML. They have allowed IBM and others to shrink the size of transistors down to just a few nanometers, tens of thousands of times thinner than a strand of hair. With these machines, IBM has shown a path for building chips from 7nm down to our latest innovations with 2nm nanosheet technology. The 2nm nanosheet technology allows for an impressive 50 billion transistors on a single chip the size of a fingernail.

But being able to print chip circuits at these miniscule sizes requires a resolution of laser so precise that even the current crop of machines would struggle to do so in a way that’s conducive to mass production. And as progress continues in technologies like generative AI, there’s no doubt that we’re going to need ever more powerful chips sooner rather than later. To build those, we need new tools that are capable of printing even smaller features and an ecosystem to make it a reality.