Derek Muller explains the extreme engineering behind ASML's EUV lithography machines, which manufacture the world's most advanced computer chips.
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The Machine That Saved Moore’s Law
How are microchips made?
What is extreme ultraviolet lithography?
Nuclear Fusion To The Rescue
How ASML Conquered The Chip World
Who are ASML’s biggest customers?
The Most Important Tech Company In The World
Inside ASML
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A big thank you to Marc Assinck, Jos Benschop, Jan van Schoot, and Jayson Stewart and the rest of the team at ASML.
We are also incredibly grateful to Vivek Bakshi, Andy Hawryluk, Marc Hijink, Asianometry & Claude Montcalm for their time and expertise.
If you want to learn more about ASML and how they developed EUV, check out Marc Hijnk's book “Focus: The ASML way” - focus-dewereldvanasml.nl/
Explore the Asianometry channel (including a wealth of EUV videos) here - youtube.com/@Asianometry
See Jayson Stewart’s article on the EUV light source and supernovas here - spectrum.ieee.org/euv-light-source
The photo at is used with the kind permission of Piotr Krzemiński - check out his channel @nanopirate
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References: ve42.co/ASMLRefs
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Writers: Sulli Yost, Casper Mebius & Derek Muller
Producer and Director: Sulli Yost
Presenters: Derek Muller & Casper Mebius
Editor: Trenton Oliver
Additional Editors: Spencer Wright, James Stuart & Peter Nelson
Additional Writer: Vibhor Pandey
Animators: Andrew Neet, Emma Wright, Fabio Albertelli, & Mike Radjabov
Illustrators: Jakub Misiek, Maria Gusakovich, Veronika Pasynkova, Grace Nemanic, Isaac McRee, Nataly Zhuk & Hollisstudioo
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Why it's here
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What people say. Highly recommended as an incredibly detailed and clear explanation of how modern semiconductor manufacturing works at the physical limit.
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On “ASML's Best Selling Product Isn't What You Think It Is”
For those interested in ASML, and how much engineering goes into being able to make EUV lithography work reliably at scale for 3nm nodes (by hitting individual droplets of tin with highly accurate lasers and turning them into plasma!), I highly recommend this recent (Dec 2025) Veritasium video about them: link to this video For more: link (There's something incredible and downright "alchemical" about the fact that the reason our sand can "think" is because we use light to vaporize tin which then carves intricate glyphs into the sand!)
ASML's secret sauce is not that secret or uncopyable. The Chinese are already working on their clone of the Twinscan tools. Veritasium recently made a good video on the ASML machine design: link to this video The outcome may seem like magic, but the input is "simply" hard work and a big budget: billions of dollars and years of investment into tuning the parameters like droplet size, frequency, etc... The interviews make it clear that the real reason ASML's machines are (currently) unique is that few people had the vision, patience, and money to fund what seemed at the time impossible. The real magic was that ASML managed to hang on by a fingernail and get a successful result before the money ran out. N…
The whole process was deep magic to me before I watched that video. It didn't seem less magical after I've watched it. More so, if anything. Asianometry0 has a number of videos on EUV lithography that cover some of the mind-blowing advances in the years since. Veritasium1 recently also made a video on the subject. 0link1link to this video
Veritasium has a nice video about it link to this video Obviously, there are a lot of reasons why. But it boils down to having the vision, the belief and the strength to follow through over many years. It's important to not confound vision with random Kool-Aid. Instead it's grounded in research. That research is itself grounded in a strong vision and belief — it got laughed by the entire physics community at the time: > 'people seemed unwilling to believe bending x-rays, and they tended to that we had actually made an image by regard the whole thing as a big fish story Now contrast this with the current academic reality — "publish or perish" and the reality of venture financing and corporate culture th…
> This is an important distinction because there are things like microprocessors, which no single person knows how to make. But also: no single person could alone build something that has anywhere near the same capability I recently watched this: link to this video The levels of advanced _whatever_ that we've reached is absurdly bonkers. It seems to me that at some point in the last 50 or so years the world went from "given a lot of time I can make a _crude_ but reasonably functional version of whatever XYZ in my garage" to "it requires the structural backbone of a whole civilization to achieve XYZ". Of course it's sort of a delusion. Maybe it's more about the ramp appearing more exponential than ever.
…computer but that's different from saying they understand billions of transistors b/c no one really understands billions of transistors even though a single transistor is understood well enough to be manufactured in large enough quantities that almost anyone who wants to can have the equivalent of a supercomputer in their pocket for less than $1k: link to this video . Somewhere along the way from one transistor to a few billion human understanding stops but we still know how it was all assembled together to perform boolean arithmetic operations.…
On “ASML unveils EUV light source advance that could yield 50% more chips by 2030”
IIRC from the Veritasium video0 there is actually some hydrogen gas flowing at quite a high speed though the laser chamber to carry away the tin debris so that it does not accumulate on the mirrors. 0link to this video
On “Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock”
Here is the Veritasium video where they review ASML's EUV lithography in depth: link to this video High thermal conductivity, inertness, and low absorption of the EUV wavelength used are the primary characteristics needed, and purity is needed to eliminate contamination of numerous ultrasensitive stages. AI summarized it as follows: EUV tools require ultra‑high‑purity helium, typically grade 9N (99.9999999%) or better, with strict ppb‑level limits on: Nitrogen, Oxygen, Moisture, Hydrocarbons, Refractory compounds, Particulates. How helium is used: - Cooling the EUV plasma source - Purging and protecting optics - Maintaining inert, ultra‑clean environments - Leak detection
I just watched the Vertasium video1 on ASML's EUV lithgoraphy machines over the weekend, and I think the qualifier they used was "most complex machine _you can purchase commercially_". I can't remember if it was an ASML representative that said that, or if it was an overlaid asterisk that popped up on the screen at some point - but I definitely remember thinking about the space shuttle and Saturn V/Apollo and those sorts of things before I saw the qualifier. 1: link to this video
