AMSL: 4.5 Million Cumulative EUV Wafers Processed Through 2018

ASML has disclosed at the IEDM 2019 conference that a total of 4.5 million wafers had been processed using EUV tools until 2019, as reported by AnandTech. The company’s latest NXE:3400C systems achieves 170 wafer per hour throughput.

Of the 4.5 million wafers that had cumulatively run through ASML’s EUV tools from 2011 until late 2018, the majority (2.5 million) occurred in 2018 alone, roughly doubling each year since the 0.6 million at the start of 2016. For comparison, TSMC manufactures roughly 12 million wafers annually, although it should be noted that a wafer undergoes potentially dozen of lithography exposures during its manufacturing.

NXE:3400C Update

(Image credit: AnandTech)

Despite EUV being even more delayed than Intel’s 10nm process, ASML highlighted the progress it has made on EUV throughput, the main factor that has limited its economical viability. This has increased by over 17x in five years. The latest NXE:3400C achieves a 170 wafers per hour. Throughput in commercial deployments will likely be lower, though, based on the exposure dose and system downtime.

(Image credit: AnandTech)

Another improvement to the NXE:3400C has been its modular vessel, which improves serviceability to reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR) significantly to improve its availability metric, which has reached 75% to 85%, according to AnandTech.

(Image credit: AnandTech)

The throughput and availability metrics show EUV's steady progress towards commercial viability over the year.

The NXE:3400C will be followed by the EXE:5000 series in 2023 with a 0.55 numerical aperture (NA) compared to the former’s 0.33NA, improving the resolution by 67% and the effective wafer throughput by even more compared to multiple patterning EUV on a 0.33NA system.

Also at IEDM 2019:

  • Intel demonstrates STT-MRAM for L4 cache applications
  • Imec fabricates transistors with two-dimensional MoS2 channel 
  • Intel outlines 3D monolithic and system level scaling research with nanoribbons and Omni-Directional Interconnect
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