TSMC Confident It Can Avoid High NA Machines Until 2026 Says Executive

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After Intel's fanfare and celebrations for its successful installation and start-up of the world's most advanced semiconductor fabrication machines earlier this year, called high NA EUV scanners, an eecutive from the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) shared that his firm can use existing low NA machines for a couple of years at the least. Intel recently received the first such machine, and the firm's current road map sees the equipment come online to manufacture a variant of the 14A manufacturing process node.

At an event in Amsterdam, the TSMC executives shared their thoughts on the need to expand chip manufacturing capacity in the continent and upgrade existing machines. Among the executives who spoke, TSMC's senior vice president for business development, Kevin Zhang, shared that while he was impressed with the high NA EUV capability, the sticker price of the machine was a bit too high for his comfort.

TSMC Executive Believes A16 Chip Process Technology Can Be Produced Without Needing High NA EUV Scanners

Even though low NA EUV scanners are commonplace now due to advanced technologies like TSMC and Intel's 3nm manufacturing processes, before EUV scanners, firms had relied extensively on DUV machines to manufacturer 7nm and later chips.

Chip makers can manufacture advanced chips with older machines provided they split the original design into multiple parts during the process. The comments made by TSMC's SVP in Amsterdam appear to conform to this principle as well since he believes that TSMC can avoid using high NA EUV machines until it starts manufacturing products with its A16 process technology.

Currently, semiconductor process technology families use nanometers to measure transistor dimensions. However, further shrinkage has led Intel and TSMC to upgrade their nomenclature for future technologies. They have replaced nanometer with angstrom, and the A16 branding refers to a technology that would be equivalent to 1.6 nanometers under the current terminology.

Manufacturing chips with sub 2 nanometer resolutions require machines capable of finely printing circuits on wafers. At the technology symposium in Taiwan, TSMC's Zhang stated that his firm's existing EUV capability can support chip production until late 2026 - when the A16 process technology family will be due according to the current road map.

Intel appears to operate under the same assumption, as a recent technology road map saw it share that high NA EUV will manufacture 14A chips. Assuming that TSMC and Intel's angstrom era technology marketing terms are at parity, then the duo might start using the newer machines in the same time frame.

While marketing uses terms such as nanometer often interchangeably, process technologies refer to a collection of the dimensions of a transistor on a chip. 3-nanometer technologies, which are currently the most advanced in the world, refer to the distances between the transistors on the chip along with other variables. Smaller transistors allow chip manufacturers to reduce these distances and make the jump to the next processing node.

Referring to the A16 process technology, Zhang commented that, "I think at this point, our existing EUV capability should be able to support that," reports Taipei Times. He added, "I like the high-NA EUV’s capability, but I don’t like the sticker price."

Intel's recent status update on the high NA EUV scanners saw the firm stress that using high NA could improve overall manufacturing costs by reducing the number of masks. Masks contain a chip's design, and older machines rely on more masks to produce crisper results.

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