EUV

Why does it take three Boeing 747s to deliver one machine - and why can only one company on earth build it?

Every advanced chip in the world is printed by an extreme ultraviolet lithography system: two hundred tons of engineering, a hundred thousand parts, and a light source that vaporizes fifty thousand droplets of molten tin every second. This book opens that machine and follows the forty years it took to build.

Inside, you'll find:

• How the light is made. A laser strikes each falling tin droplet twice, producing plasma tens of times hotter than the sun's surface - and under a tenth of one percent of it reaches the silicon.
• Why there is no glass in it. At 13.5 nanometers everything absorbs, so mirrors form the image - polished so flat that scaled to the size of Germany, the largest bump would stand a tenth of a millimeter tall.
• The forty-year road. Three rival technologies that consumed billions and failed, a consortium Intel rescued with $250 million in 1997, and a licensing decision in 1999 that quietly settled the next thirty years.
• Why the customers bought their own supplier. In 2012, Intel, TSMC and Samsung together put €3.85 billion of equity and €1.38 billion of research funding into the company they all depend on.
• What it means now. Export licenses, a chain in which nearly every link has one or two suppliers, and a careful account of what China has and has not achieved.

No physics background is needed. There is one formula in the book, it has three symbols, and every estimate is labeled as one.

The remarkable thing is not the machine. It is that anyone kept paying for twenty years while it did not work.