The strange way the world's fastest microchips are made

Summary

Planet Money: The Strange Way the World's Fastest Microchips Are Made

Introduction

In the episode titled “The Strange Way the World's Fastest Microchips Are Made,” hosts Jeff Guo and Sally Helm delve into the intricate and improbable journey of developing extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography—the groundbreaking technology that underpins the most advanced microchips in the world. This detailed exploration uncovers the blend of scientific ingenuity, economic challenges, and international collaboration that culminated in the creation of microchips capable of powering cutting-edge AI models and modern electronic devices.

The Breakthrough: Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography

Jeff Guo introduces listeners to EUV lithography, a revolutionary method for etching microscopic circuits onto silicon wafers. He describes the technology’s complexity and necessity: “With this new technology, these new machines, they were able to etch billions and billions of circuits onto a single chip. But they're also incredibly delicate” (02:15). The sole company to master this technology, asml—a Dutch firm—plays a central role in this narrative. Guo recounts his visit to ASML’s San Diego labs, revealing the meticulous environment required to house such sensitive machinery.

The Early Visionary: Andy Haverluck’s Vision

The story traces back to the 1980s with Andy Haverluck, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, who envisioned using EUV light to enhance microchip manufacturing. “Andy’s big idea was that he thought it was possible to etch microchips using extreme ultraviolet light,” Guo explains (07:06). Initially working on nuclear weapons research, Haverluck recognized that the precise control of EUV light could revolutionize microchip fabrication. However, his innovative proposal met significant skepticism at industry conferences, where peers dismissed the feasibility of such an approach (09:06).

Government Support and Industry Partnership

Despite early setbacks, the US government saw potential in repurposing research from national labs to stimulate economic growth. As the Cold War waned, Congress incentivized partnerships between national laboratories and private companies to explore commercial applications of their scientific discoveries (11:34). This strategic pivot provided the necessary seed funding for Haverluck and his colleagues to collaborate with industry giants like AT&T Bell Labs and Intel. “The government seed money had unleashed all these different teams, each working on their own piece of the extreme ultraviolet puzzle,” notes Aglae Howarth, a technician involved in the project (13:13).

The Challenge of Commercialization: ASML’s Pivotal Role

By the early 2000s, despite significant progress, the project faced imminent cancellation due to budget constraints as President Clinton sought to balance the federal budget (13:25). However, recognizing the technology’s potential, major US microchip companies rallied to continue funding the research. ASML emerged as the key player tasked with transforming the laboratory prototype into a commercially viable product. This transition required overcoming both scientific hurdles and economic barriers. “ASML now controls maybe the most valuable technology in the world. Its latest extreme ultraviolet machines go for about $380 million each,” Guo emphasizes (27:45).

The Culmination: From Prototype to Industrial Powerhouse

After years of relentless development and substantial financial investment—over $6 billion by ASML alone—the first commercially successful EUV lithography machines were realized in 2017. Guo describes his awe-inspiring visit to ASML’s San Diego lab, where he witnessed the intense plasma necessary for EUV light generation: “Standing there was kind of terrifying. All those violent explosions happening 50,000 times a second inside that chamber” (26:50). This technological marvel marked the realization of decades of collaborative effort, transforming a once-dismissed idea into an indispensable tool for modern electronics manufacturing.

Conclusion: The Economic and Technological Impact

The successful development and commercialization of EUV lithography by ASML not only cemented the company's position as a global technology leader but also ensured the continued advancement of the microchip industry. The episode highlights the critical interplay between government support, private investment, and international collaboration in overcoming improbable technological challenges. “Advanced chip technology like this, it kind of feels like inevitable. It feels like one of the most basic underlying facts of our modern world. But this stuff almost didn't happen,” Guo reflects (28:43). The story of EUV lithography underscores the unpredictable nature of innovation and the profound economic implications that can arise from persistent scientific endeavor.

Notable Quotes

• Jeff Guo on the initial skepticism: “I thought, you gotta be kidding me. This has gotta be science fiction” (01:08).

• Andy Haverluck on early challenges: “I felt humiliated and embarrassed” (09:44).

• Aglae Howarth on overcoming obstacles: “We had never built a lithography tool in our lives. None of us. Right” (16:15).

• Jeff Guo on the outcome: “ASML now controls maybe the most valuable technology in the world” (27:45).

Final Thoughts

“The Strange Way the World's Fastest Microchips Are Made” offers a compelling narrative of innovation against the odds. It illustrates how visionary ideas, when supported by persistent effort and strategic investment, can lead to transformative technological advancements. This episode is a testament to the intricate dance between science, economics, and global collaboration that drives progress in our increasingly digital world.

Transcript

[Sponsor Voice]

This message comes from NPR sponsor Vanta. Join over 7,000 global companies like Atlassian Flow Health and Quora that use Vanta to help manage risk and help prove security in real time. Visit vanta.complanetmoney to receive a special offer.

[NPR Announcer]

Hey, quick word before the show. The 2024 election is over, and as a new administration prepares to assume power, it is our job across the entire NPR network to report on what they do with that power. That's why we're here. And your support makes it possible for us to break down big stories, to fact check, and to make sure you understand what's going on. When you donate, you make a difference in our ability to do this work. If you're already a supporter, we're going to take this moment to just say thank you, truly. And if you're not, you can go to donate.NPR.org to give. That's donate.NPR.org okay, here's the show.

[Sally Helm]

This is Planet Money from NPR.

[Jeff Guo]

So there is this technology that when I first heard about it, I thought, you gotta be kidding me. This has gotta be science fiction. It's this new way of making microchips.

[Sally Helm]

There is only one company that has figured out this technology, a Dutch company called asml. And recently, Jeff, you went to their labs in San Diego.

[Jeff Guo]

How many people have seen what we're about to see today?

[Sally Helm]

Well, a lot of ASML engineers.

[Jeff Guo]

Okay. And that's most of the list. It's a working clean room, so it's.

[Sally Helm]

Very rare for people to go inside.

[Jeff Guo]

That's Sarah DeCrescenzo. She's a comms person for ASML. And she's about to show me the heart of one of their new microchip etching machines.

[Sally Helm]

A microchip is basically a bunch of circuits that are etched onto a piece of silicon. The more circuits on the chip, the more powerful it is. And for almost the entire history of microchips, the circuits have been getting smaller and smaller and the chips have been getting more powerful. But about 10 years ago, that progress slowed pretty dramatically. The industry was staring down a dead.

[Jeff Guo]

End until ASML made a breakthrough. With this new technology, these new machines, they were able to etch billions and billions of circuits onto a single chip. But they're also incredibly delicate. Sarah says it's been more than a year since they've let a journalist inside this lab. They don't love to do it because even the tiniest speck of dust could ruin the machine.

[Sally Helm]

And journalists are not sterile.

[Jeff Guo]

Absolutely not. So we have to go through this Whole decontamination procedure. There is a machine where you stick your foot into to clean your shoes. This is great. Oh, it untied my shoes. That's how powerful it was. Next, a technician named Blaine Howarth comes over to wipe down my microphone and recording equipment.

[Blaine Howarth]

This is all we gotta clean?

[Jeff Guo]

Yeah, all this equipment. What about the foam? Blaine is pointing to this black foam windscreen that's on my microphone, which I will admit was a little dirty. It had some cat hair stuck to it. What don't you like about it?

[Blaine Howarth]

The particles it gives off.

[Jeff Guo]

What particle? Oh, you mean this cat hair?

[Blaine Howarth]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cat hair is a problem for us. It really is.

[Jeff Guo]

Okay, I put on what looks like a thin plastic spacesuit, and now I am ready to walk into the clean room. I'm about to see one of the most complicated technologies ever invented.

[Sally Helm]

And, Jeff, at that point, you had been talking about this amazing microchip etching technology for, like, months.

[Jeff Guo]

Yes, because this is the technology behind all the new chips powering the most advanced AI models in the world. It is so important that the US has been lobbying the Dutch government not to let ASML sell any of these machines to China. They see it as a matter of national security. But most of all, I've just been fascinated by these machines themselves. Like, let me briefly explain how they work.

[Sally Helm]

Alright, take it away.

[Jeff Guo]

You start with a laser. A laser that is so powerful, it could cut through a bank vault like butter. And then you focus that massive laser on a tiny droplet of molten tin, like the metal tin, and then, blammo. The tin vaporizes into a plasma that gives off a beautiful intense light. They call it extreme ultraviolet. And this light bounces off a series of mirrors, which have to be like the smoothest mirrors on the planet. And it etches billions and billions of tiny little microscopic circuits onto a wafer of silicon, which, by the way, is magnetically levitating, culminating in the most powerful microchips that have ever existed.

[Sally Helm]

I mean, I can see why they're a little bit touchy about the cat hair.

[Jeff Guo]

Yes. And, Sally, this extreme ultraviolet technology for making chips, it is such an accomplishment. It is like our generation's moon landing. For years, a lot of people thought it was impossible. And one of the things I've been obsessed with is how. How did we even do it? How did humanity pull this off? Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Jeff Guo.

[Sally Helm]

And I'm Sally Helm. It is easy to take for granted that microchips are just going to get more and more powerful. But they don't get powerful all by themselves. It takes a lot of people over a lot of time. Often they make bets that in the moment seem unlikely, even foolish.

[Jeff Guo]

Today on the show, how one of the most complicated, most improbable technologies in the world, this breakthrough in how we make microchips, came to be and how it almost didn't.

[Sponsor Voice]

This message comes from Apple Card. Apple Card is the perfect card for your holiday shopping. When you use Apple Card on your iPhone, you'll earn up to 3% daily cash back on every purchase, including products at Apple like a new iPhone 16 or Apple Watch Ultra. Apply now in the Wallet app on your iPhone, subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch terms and more@apple card.com this message comes from Capital One. Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.combank for details. Capital1NA member FDIC.

[Sally Helm]

Joe Biden's on his way out.

[Jeff Guo]

Donald Trump's on his way back. Want to know what's happening as the.

[Sally Helm]

Presidential transition is underway?

[Jeff Guo]

The NPR Politics podcast has you covered with the latest news and analysis.

[Sally Helm]

Listen to the NPR Politics Podcast. Every technology starts with an idea, and in the beginning, that idea is almost like a dream. One of the first people who believed in this revolutionary way of making microchips was Andy Haverluck.

[Jeff Guo]

You're kind of a big deal in the world of microchips and stuff, right?

[Andy Haverluck]

That's for somebody else to decide. I don't, I don't consider myself a big deal. I just consider myself one of many.

[Jeff Guo]

Andy's big idea was that he thought it was possible to etch microchips using extreme ultraviolet light. And this idea actually came to him when he was working on something completely different. It was the 1980s, and he was a young scientist at the legendary Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California.

[Sally Helm]

Yet at the dawn of the Cold War, the United States had started putting billions of dollars into science and research, and it created these big national labs.

[Andy Haverluck]

They're all over the place, and they all have different functions. The primary function for Lawrence Livermore is nuclear weapons research.

[Jeff Guo]

Yeah. The government scientists at Lawrence Livermore have designed more than a dozen different types of nuclear warheads. They study nuclear reactions like nuclear fusion.

[Sally Helm]

A fusion reaction generates a lot of powerful light, including extreme ultraviolet. Andy and his team were working on new kinds of mirrors, mirrors that for the first time could reflect and control the light Coming off of a fusion reaction.

[Jeff Guo]

And Andy realizes that these new special mirrors might have a use outside the lab because extreme ultraviolet light is super precise. And if we can now control it with these mirrors, we could etch, like, the tiniest circuits ever and make microchips way more powerful. This is chapter one in the life of many technologies. Someone looks at a scientific breakthrough or a discovery in a lab and imagines how it might apply to something totally different, Solve some problem in the real world.

[Sally Helm]

Andy goes to a conference to present this idea. He remembers feeling nervous. All the top microchip researchers are there.

[Jeff Guo]

Do you remember the moment where you went up and presented it? What was that like?

[Andy Haverluck]

I remember the moment after I presented it. It was not well received. So many naysayers got up and basically said, stupid idea. Crazy idea. No, it'll never happen.

[Sally Helm]

Andy says it was brutal. Just everyone piling on him, telling him all the different reasons why his idea wouldn't work. Like these mirrors would have to be the smoothest mirrors on the planet. And was it even possible to generate extreme ultraviolet consistently? It's all just too complicated.

[Jeff Guo]

Andy goes back to his lab. His boss asks how his presentation went.

[Andy Haverluck]

I said, I don't want to talk about it. I will never speak of it again.

[Jeff Guo]

Oh, my God.

[Andy Haverluck]

I was just. I felt humiliated and embarrassed.

[Jeff Guo]

But a few days later, Andy gets a phone call. It's from this guy, Bill Brinkman. He'd heard about Andy's presentation and wanted to know more. Andy's like, who is this guy?

[Andy Haverluck]

And so I went to my boss and I said, who's Bill Brakeman? And he looked at me and said, he's the executive Vice President of AT&T Bell Labs.

[Sally Helm]

And I went, oh, Bell labs. It's the place where the laser was invented, where fiber optics was invented. It's one of the most famous private laboratories in the world. And Bill Brinkman was one of their top scientists.

[Andy Haverluck]

And I said, well, he just called me. And my boss looked at me and said, he called you? And I went, yeah. And he said, tell them you'll be on the next plane out.

[Jeff Guo]

The folks at Bell Labs were also looking into ways to etch microchips using extreme ultraviolet light. They flew Andy out to their headquarters in New Jersey.

[Andy Haverluck]

They had an auditorium with. There were 50, 75 people there to listen to me. It was a huge reception for us, you know, for that. And I went, holy crap.

[Sally Helm]

Andy had found a group of fellow believers, People who thought maybe this extreme ultraviolet technology really could work. There was also a researcher in Japan Hiro Kinoshita, who had started tinkering with the idea even before Andy. But most of the microchip industry doubted the idea.

[Jeff Guo]

What Andy and the other believers needed to do was to prove that this technology was possible. And to do that, they needed someone to take a gamble. They needed seed money. This is the start of chapter two in the life of many technologies. And in this case, a lot of that early R and D money would end up coming from the US government.

[Sally Helm]

Yeah, you see, this was the 1980s, and the government was beginning to think differently about its role in R and D and science. They had been spending billions of dollars on scientific research, which gave them an edge in the Cold War.

[Jeff Guo]

A lot of nuclear weapons stuff, right?

[Sally Helm]

But the Cold War was winding down, the Berlin Wall was about to crumble.

[Jeff Guo]

And Congress realized that the national labs were sitting on all this research that could have a lot of practical applications, could stimulate the economy, help make US Companies a lot more competitive.

[Sally Helm]

And so Congress told the national labs, we want you to partner up with US Companies. We want you to work together to explore commercial uses for your research, and we will give you some seed money to do it.

[Jeff Guo]

It was perfect timing for our band of believers. Andy and his team at Lawrence Livermore eventually signed a deal with several US Companies to research extreme ultraviolet chip making.

[Sally Helm]

Bill Brinkman and AT&T Bell Labs signed a deal, too. And it wasn't just them. By the early 1990s, a bunch of companies and national nuclear weapons labs were working together to see if this technology was viable. One of the people involved was Rick Stulin. Rick was in charge of the research at Sandia National Labs.

[Jeff Guo]

Was there, like a quarterback for all of this, or were you all just working on individual projects, trying to chip away at this huge problem?

[Blaine Howarth]

Yeah, that's a great question. We did not have a quarterback.

[Jeff Guo]

Yeah, Rick said the government seed money had unleashed all these different teams, each working on their own piece of the extreme ultraviolet puzzle.

[Sally Helm]

And bit by bit, they start to show that they can overcome the technological obstacles here, using extreme ultraviolet to etch microchips. It looks like that's really possible.

[Jeff Guo]

But then in early 1996, Rick gets.

[Blaine Howarth]

A call from Washington saying, rick, we're terminating the program. Congress is no longer interested and has some concerns about this looking like corporate welfare. So you basically have about six months to wrap things up and move on.

[Jeff Guo]

President Clinton is trying to balance the budget and that seed money for projects like extreme ultraviolet research dries up, meaning that government scientists like Rick and Andy, they might have to go back to working on, you know, nuclear fusion or national security projects.

[Blaine Howarth]

And so we were stunned. And at the same time, we knew we were onto something. I mean, we knew this was something that was going to make a difference. So I was, you know, obviously scrambling.

[Jeff Guo]

Like, the future of microchips was kind of hanging in the balance. The world had been transformed by faster and faster chips, faster and faster computers. But with the current technology, there was a limit to how fast chips could get. The industry would soon be facing a dead end.

[Sally Helm]

Rick realizes that to save all the extreme ultraviolet research they'd been working on, they needed to raise a lot of money fast. So he goes to the big US Microchip companies and says, the government is out. Will you make up the difference here? Take on all the financial risk yourselves?

[Blaine Howarth]

And it was incredible to watch them sort of sit up and say, this cannot happen. We're going to figure out a way to continue to fund this because we think you're going to make it.

[Jeff Guo]

Wow. So they, like, made basically a giant industrial GoFundMe.

[Blaine Howarth]

Well, they did. They did. That's exactly right.

[Jeff Guo]

The government seed money had worked. The labs had made so much progress that the biggest companies in the US Microchip industry, companies like intel, wanted them to keep going and were willing to make a much bigger investment in this extreme ultraviolet technology.

[Sally Helm]

Intel and other companies supersize the R and D budget from a couple of million dollars a year to more than $40 million a year. And they define a clear goal. They want the national labs to work together to build a prototype, an actual machine that can etch a microchip from start to finish using extreme ultraviolet light. It's called a lithography machine.

[Jeff Guo]

Rick is appointed the chief operating officer for this huge, kind of unprecedented partnership between the national labs and private industry. Basically, he is now the quarterback. Was that a daunting challenge?

[Blaine Howarth]

Yes. Yes, it was. We had never built a lithography tool in our lives. None of us. Right.

[Jeff Guo]

And extreme ultraviolet light is so tricky to work with that it takes years. But by 2001, they pull it off, they have a prototype.

[Blaine Howarth]

Yeah, it looked very, very much like a research tool. Wasn't pretty. Didn't have a pretty exterior. There were a lot of cables all over the place. We thought it was beautiful in every way.

[Sally Helm]

Rick remembers feeling just over the moon, like they had finally proven that this technology was really possible.

[Blaine Howarth]

The mood was giddy. It was exuberance, and it was a sense of pride. It was like a moonshot.

[Sally Helm]

And we landed right now that the prototype was built. Rick's job was mostly over, but now comes the final chapter in the life of a technology that kind of ugly cable Y prototype has to become a slick real world machine, one that can sit on the factory floor in companies all around the world, etching tiny circuits onto reams and reams of microchips.

[Blaine Howarth]

And our original slogan for the program was on the floor in 04. We wanted these tools to be on the semiconductor manufacturer's floor in O4. Well, that was ridiculous. We were way, way, way, way too optimistic.

[Sally Helm]

The toughest challenges would still be to.

[Jeff Guo]

Come after the break. It is one thing to prove that a technology is scientifically possible, but to prove that a technology is commercially viable, that you can make money off of it, that is something else entirely.

[Sponsor Voice]

This message comes from NPR sponsor Merrill. Whatever your financial goals are, you want a straightforward path there. But the real world doesn't usually work that way. Merrill understands that. That's why with a dedicated Merrill advisor, you get a personalized plan and a clear path forward. Go to ML.combullish to learn more. Merrill, a Bank of America company what would you like the power to do? Investing involves risk Merrill Lynch, Pierce Fenner and Smith Inc. Registered Broker Dealer Registered Investment Advisor Member SIPC this message comes from BetterHelp. It's important to take time to show gratitude towards others, but it's equally important to thank yourself. Life throws a lot of curveballs, and being grateful isn't always easy. Therapy can help remind you of all that you're worthy of and all that you do have. Let the gratitude flow with BetterHelp. [e-mail] NPR today to get 10% off.

Your first month support for NPR and the following message come from LinkedIn ads. As a B2B marketer, you know how noisy the digital ad space can be. If your message isn't targeted to the right audience, it just disappears into the noise. By using LinkedIn ads, you can reach professionals who are more likely to find your ad relevant. Target them by job title, industry, company and more. Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at LinkedIn.com money terms and conditions apply.

[Jeff Guo]

You hear it all the time. Some lab announces a revolutionary breakthrough. Scientists have discovered a way to encode data using holograms. Or they're able to levitate frogs using magnets. Or they've created nanowires stronger than maybe anything in the universe.

[Sally Helm]

But then, years later, like, nothing seems to come of it. Where are the frog levitating machines? Where are they? Where are they?

[Jeff Guo]

Where are they?

[Sally Helm]

And the Main reason that most technologies never make it into the real world boils down to economics. Like, a lot of really cool technology just ends up being too expensive or too impractical or both.

[Jeff Guo]

Yeah. And for extreme ultraviolet chip making, that reckoning came in the early 2000s. By that point, the US microchip industry and the US government had spent hundreds of millions of doll dollars proving that this next generation technology could work in the lab.

[Sally Helm]

And now they turned to that final chapter in the life of a technology, getting it to market. Like some company needed to take all the research and the prototype and figure out how to make the technology profitable, basically make a commercial version of the machine. And for this challenge, the US effort turned to a Dutch company, asml.

[Jeff Guo]

I think people now in retrospect think, oh, like this could have been an American technology, but we passed on the torch to a Dutch company. Well, that's an expression, but you could also say that US dropped the ball on lithography. Sorry for being blunt.

[Sally Helm]

In a Dutch way.

[Jeff Guo]

Very Dutch, yes. Mark Hejink is a Dutch business journalist. He's kind of the world's expert on asml. Wrote a book about it recently. Mark says, sure, some politicians wanted a US company to bring these machines to market. The problem was there weren't any great options in the us.

[Sally Helm]

The major players at the time were ASML and two Japanese companies, Canon and Nikon. But Canon and Nikon were out because the United States saw Japan as its main microchip rival. So the industry turned to asml.

[Jeff Guo]

ASML had been doing its own research into extreme ultraviolet, and in the early 2000s, it took on the challenge of making a profitable commercial machine. At the time, there was still quite a bit of work left to do. The prototype was a nice proof of concept, but in order to etch a single wafer of microchips, this prototype might have taken a whole day. A commercially viable machine needs to make hundreds of wafers an hour. Otherwise it just wasn't worth it. That's how brutal the economics of the microchip industry are. You have to have a machine that.

[Sally Helm]

Keeps on running day in, day out.

[Jeff Guo]

Without too many troubles, without too many errors. So it's like crazy science and crazy economics in one machine.

[Sally Helm]

In the beginning, ASML was pretty sure they could get the science and the economics to work. They thought they could make a machine ready to go into factories by 2006. Not quite on the floor in 04, but close enough.

[Jeff Guo]

The main problem they had to tackle was gathering enough extreme ultraviolet light to etch microchips you need a lot of light. The more light you have, the faster the machine can go. But for the longest time, ASML couldn't get that extreme ultraviolet light bright enough. And once you get to see one of their machines up close, you start to understand why we're gonna have to put on some hard hats now. Yes. Yes, please.

[Sally Helm]

That is Alex Schaffgans. He is the head of engineering at ASML's San Diego lab, which Jeff went to visit. He says there just isn't any simple way to generate extreme ultraviolet light.

[Jeff Guo]

Remember, this is the part that sounds like science fiction. First, you needed a giant laser. Alex takes me to one of their laser rooms. It has rows and rows of these, like 6 foot tall beige cabinets. This entire room powers just one laser. Can I ask why that red light is rotating? It looks like an alarm light that the laser is armed and can fire. Oh, good to know.

[Sally Helm]

But this laser itself did not produce extreme ultraviolet light. It was just a regular laser, albeit super sized. But then the laser had to hit that droplet of molten tin, create that super hot plasma, and that would give off a flash of extreme ultraviolet light. And in order to get enough extreme ultraviolet light, they needed these tin plasma explosions to happen 50,000 times a second.

[Jeff Guo]

Yeah. Alex takes me to a test chamber. Looks like a big metal sewer pipe with a plexiglass window on one side. We're about to see something that very few people have seen. Inside is a nozzle spitting out these molten tin droplets. And we've lit up the chamber with a flashlight so that you can visually see this spiderweb looking string of droplets. Holy. Wait, it does. It looks like a. It looks like a very thin spider web. It took years to figure out how to make that thin, silvery spider web. The engineers had to come up with clever ways to vibrate the nozzle so every droplet would be the exact same size and shape.

[Sally Helm]

There were hundreds and hundreds of engineering challenges like this. And every time they solved one problem, another one would pop up. By 2006, their original deadline, they had a machine. But it was too slow, and it broke down too often.

[Jeff Guo]

ASML told the industry, its customers, its investors, Just give us another year, one more year. They said that year after year after year.

[Sally Helm]

By 2011, ASML's Japanese rivals, Canon and Nikon, had given up on extreme ultraviolet technology. And some of the execs at ASML were wondering if they should give up too. They went to their customers, chipmakers like intel, and asked them, are you absolutely sure that you still want these Machines. It's going to take more time, more money. Maybe we should just call it now.

[Jeff Guo]

But the chipmakers are like, no, no, no, no, no. We still want these machines because without them, progress will slow, and we're not really sure how to make faster chips. So ASML forged ahead, and in 2017, they did it. Back at the lab, I suit up to see the final product. Alex leads me into what looks like a cavern or a cathedral. We turn the corner and oh, my God. This is the plasma vessel. Ahead of us is this stainless steel sphere. It's the size of a car. Inside this sphere is where the turret droplet meets the giant laser. The plasma from the explosion gets 40 times hotter than the surface of the sun. A nearby screen shows what's happening inside. I can see a steady purple glow. This light source is currently making plasma. So we is running right now. Running right now. Tell me that it's running right now. Standing there was kind of terrifying. All those violent explosions happening 50, 50,000 times a second inside that chamber. You're seeing just the glow of this hot plasma.

[Blaine Howarth]

Oh, my God.

[Jeff Guo]

Yep, we're making plasma. What? We were looking at that purple glowing plasma. It was the culmination of almost 40 years of research. It started in the 1980s with people like Andy dreaming of this new way of making microchips. It was nurtured through the 90s by this partnership between the US microchip industry and US Nuclear Weapons Laboratories. And then for almost 20 years, it was in the hands of ASML, who finally brought it to market.

[Sally Helm]

And that final chapter tends to be the hardest and the most expensive part in the life of a new technology. In this case, the early research and prototype had cost U.S. taxpayers and U.S. companies maybe 300, $400 million. But ASML says after they picked up the baton, they spent about 15 times that amount. More than $6 billion.

[Jeff Guo]

It's funny. ASML execs say if they had known how much it cost, how long it'd take, they probably wouldn't have taken a bet on this technology. But their gamble paid off. ASML now controls maybe the most valuable technology in the world. Its latest extreme ultraviolet machines go for about $380 million each. They're some of the most complicated objects that humans have ever built, and they've become indispensable. They're used by companies like intel, tsmc, and Samsung. They're producing the chips, powering the most advanced AI models. And, you know, advanced chip technology like this, it kind of feels like inevitable. It feels like one of the most basic underlying facts of our modern world. But this stuff almost didn't happen.

[Sally Helm]

This episode was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Jess Jiang. It was fact checked by Danya Suleiman and engineered by Patrick Murray. Alex Goldmark is our Executive producer.

[Jeff Guo]

Special thanks to John Carruthers, Danny Brown, Andre Litvak, and Georgi Vashenko. And if you're interested in Mark's book about asml, it's called the ASML Way. I'm Jeff Guo.

[Sally Helm]

And I'm Sally Helm. This is npr. Thanks for listening.

[Sponsor Voice]

This message comes from Capella University. With Capella's flexpath Learning format, you can set your own deadlines and learn on your schedule. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn [e-mail] this message comes from Solidigm an outdated approach to data infrastructure could hold back a company's AI ambitions. The new era of AI requires a new approach to data storage. From the highest capacities to the highest performance. Solidigm solid state storage solutions are optimized to meet the complex data demands at each stage of the AI data pipeline, all with a smaller footprint and incredible energy efficiency. Learn how Solidigm can help businesses achieve their AI ambitions at storageforai.com this message.

Comes from Capital One. Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.combank for details. Capital One NA Member FDIC.