Inside the Chip-Making Machine the World Can’t Live Without

WSJ Tech News Briefing

The Wall Street Journal

News, Tech News

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our modern world depends on chips, and our most modern chips depend on complex machines that use a process called extreme ultraviolet lithography. All of these machines are made by one company: ASML. The WSJ’s Ben Cohen met one of the machine’s mechanics and got a rare, behind-the-scenes tour of a factory where one of them operates. He explains the nearly sci-fi tech behind EUV lithography and gives us a peek into the one tool responsible for all the tech in your life. Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:27.9	slash UK slash AI for people.
0:35.3	Microchips are used everywhere.
0:44.6	In cars, gaming consoles, medical devices, microwaves, wind turbines, toothbrushes.
0:48.2	There are microchips in whatever you're using to listen to this podcast.
0:55.5	And to make the most cutting edge of those chips, you need an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine, or an EUV machine.
0:56.9	Pretty much everything that plugs in now has one of our chips in it.
1:01.7	Pretty much everything that plugs in has something that's gone through a lithography machine.
1:10.0	That's Brianna Hall.
1:11.7	She talked to me on her lunch break during my rare tour to see one of these machines.
1:16.8	Hall is a customer support engineer on one of the few hundred EUV lithography machines in existence.
1:22.9	These machines are ludicrously expensive.
1:25.7	Each one costs a few hundred million dollars.
1:28.3	And they're all made by one company,
1:30.3	ASML, originally advanced semiconductor materials lithography.
1:36.3	These machines have become indispensable,
1:39.3	and they depend on the invisible work of customer support engineers like Brianna Hall.
1:44.8	I just thought my job was awesome.
1:46.2	I didn't process the fact that this job is necessary for our entire world to exist as it does.
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	...

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