Etching seems like such an old-fashioned technique (for a time it was also an Olympic competition) that you don’t normally associate it with cutting-edge technology. However, integrated chips used in all our electronic devices get etched, with patterns printed on a silicon wafer. And there is one machine in the world that does that.

Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography (ASML) is done by Dutch multinational corporation ASML Holding, a company that has virtually no competition on the subject of Extreme ultraviolet lithography. This is the printing technique to create the smallest and most complex chip designs. The company is capable of etching designs as small as 8 nanometers. By comparison, a human hair is around 80,000 nanometers thick.

The printing is crucial to the chips. The grid of etched lines created by the machines is not just for show. The printing creates multiple electronic components such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors – crucial in the functions of integrated circuits. The size of these chips is finite because the size of our tech is finite especially when it comes to things like mobile phones. So the more you can etch on a single semiconductor, the better your chip is – and to etch more you need to go smaller.

This is why the machine uses extreme ultraviolet light. The laser light of this plasma has a wavelength of around 13 nanometers, close to the (arbitrary) beginning of X-ray light. Clever optical systems are used to shave off a few nanometers. There are approaches to go even further but this can’t be repeated forever. Eventually – not too far into the future – the quantum and thermodynamic effects of single silicon atoms (which have a diameter of 0.26 nanometers) will stop the etching from going any smaller.

So clever designs such as three-dimensional integrated circuitry or better software or different structures will have to compensate for the limits that physics has imposed on this technology. Still, the company will continue to send out its incredible machines so that tech companies can print their chips.

ASML Holdings’s monopoly is truly an anomaly – an anomaly that can have far-reaching consequences. They are a powerful company and they are extremely influential given that everything these days has a silicon chip inside. Their machines are very big and we have found out what happens when something stops the flow of trade – the chip shortage of the last few years is the continuous effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Extreme ultraviolet lithography is a technology essential to everything we do, but very much unknown far and wide. The single supplier of the machine that makes all the integrated chips in the world has a crucial and dominant role.