![]() Made solely by ASML in the Netherlands, EUV machines are used to etch detailed circuit patterns with nanometer-size features.Ĭhipmakers have been working on EUV technology for more than two decades. Much of the cost of new fabs goes toward buying the latest equipment, such as a tool called an extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machine that costs more than $100 million. These fabs make chips with features as small as a few nanometers in industry jargon they’re called 5-nanometer and 7-nanometer nodes. One reason for the consolidation is that building a facility to make the most advanced chips costs between $5 billion and $20 billion. ![]() And Intel, long a technology leader, is struggling to keep up, having repeatedly missed deadlines for producing its latest generations. ![]() Today, only Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in Taiwan, Intel in the United States, and Samsung in South Korea have the facilities, or fabs, that produce the most advanced chips. Twenty years ago, the world had 25 manufacturers making leading-edge chips. And because making chips requires hundreds of manufacturing steps and months of production time, the semiconductor industry cannot quickly pivot to satisfy the pandemic-fueled surge in demand.Īfter decades of fretting about how we will carve out features as small as a few nanometers on silicon wafers, the spirit of Moore’s Law-the expectation that cheap, powerful chips will be readily available-is now being threatened by something far more mundane: inflexible supply chains. Instead, the growing costs of sustaining Moore’s Law have encouraged consolidation among chipmakers and created more choke points in the immensely complex business of chip production.Įven as microchips have become essential in so many products, their development and manufacturing have come to be dominated by a small number of producers with limited capacity-and appetite-for churning out the commodity chips that are a staple for today’s technologies. Now that promise of more computing power everywhere is crumpling, but not because chipmakers have finally run up against the physical limits of technology to make ever smaller transistors.
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