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ASML on Thursday said that it had shipped its pilot High-NA EUV scanner to Intel. The Twinscan EXE:5000 extreme ultraviolet (EUV) scanner is AMSL’s very first High-NA scanner, and it has eagerly been awaited by Intel, who first placed an order for the machine back in 2018. Intel will be using the new machine to experiment with High-NA EUV before it deploys commercial grade Twinscan EXE:5200 tool for high-volume manufacturing (HVM) sometime in 2025. The announcement represents a major industry milestone that will have an impact not only on Intel, but eventually on the other leading-edge fabs as well.
«We are shipping the first High NA system and announced this in a social media post today,» a spokesperson for ASML said. «It goes to Intel as planned and announced earlier.»
The ASML Twinscan EXE High-NA scanner is set to make its journey from Veldhoven in the Netherlands all the way to Intel’s facility near Hillsboro, Oregon, where the tool, jokingly referred to by Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger as Dr. Ann Kelleher’s Christmas present, will be installed in the coming months. It is quite a colossal piece of equipment – so large, in fact, that it requires 13 truck-sized containers and 250 crates just to transport it. And once assembled, the machine is 3 stories tall, which has required Intel to build a new (and taller) fab expansion just to house it. It is estimated that each of these High-NA EUV scanners comes with a hefty price tag, likely in the range between $300 million and $400 million.
