Computing · 2019

EUV lithography

13.5 nm light to print the smallest features.

ASML's EUV scanners fire lasers at tin droplets 50,000 times per second to create extreme ultraviolet light. TSMC's N7+ used it in high-volume production in 2019, and it is required for every leading-edge chip.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

Immersion lithography 2006
Laser 1960

What it led to 3

5 nm process 2020
High-NA EUV 2023
Zettascale computing ~2035

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Transistors per microprocessor Latest: 58.2B transistors (2021) Source: Our World in Data

ML hardware FLOP/s per dollar Source: Epoch AI, ML hardware (CC BY 4.0)