GoKawiilIn April 2024 I pulled on a bunny suit at Intel’s D1X fab in Hillsboro, Oregon, and stood a few feet from a machine the size of a bus and worth a small nation state. Intel Fellow Mark Phillips explained this was ASML’s first High-NA EUV scanner, 165 tons of it. Installation had just wrapped and calibration had begun, but realistically still another few months before test wafers could be run. Intel were actually only a few weeks ahead of ASML in terms of installing a tool, enabling a close collaboration between the two.
As we toured the tool, about 15 of us or so with CNBC wielding a pre-approved camera setup, the question was if/when this tool was ever going to be involved in production silicon and hardware.
The answer landed on July 15, 2026. ASML put out a press release confirming that Intel Foundry has taken High-NA into high-volume manufacturing. Using the tool, Intel is patterning a subset of layers on some of its newest notebook processors: these are Panther Lake, the Core Ultra Series 3 laptop parts built on Intel 18A.
From Intel and ASML’s point of view, it means those High-NA layers are dual-qualified in Oregon, and yielding on par with the regular EUV tools that require multiple steps to do the same thing. I asked if this was just test chips, but Intel confirmed it means that notebooks with silicon partly printed on a $380 million High-NA scanner are heading to customers now.
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Intel Fellow Mark Phillips briefing the group at the High-NA tool in the D1X cleanroom. April 2024. Credit: Intel Corporation
Intel has been able to say it owns the world’s first High-NA tool since that 2024 tour, but there has always been a question of using tools like this for research time over production time. Getting product layers through the machine at a yield that matches the mature scanner one bay over is a big step to overcome, the next question is if the economics of a single pass on a more expensive machine work out long term.
What the machine actually is
The machine is a two-storey wall of stainless pipework, vacuum vessels and cabling wrapped around a wafer stage, and almost all of it is to serve one number in physics. Every EUV scanner in production until now has imaged through optics with a Numerical Aperture (NA) of 0.33. Numerical aperture describes how wide a cone of light the optics can gather, and a wider cone resolves finer detail, so raising it to 0.55 with High-NA sharpens the smallest single-exposure feature by roughly a third. In practice that lets a fab print in a single cycle a pattern that would need two or three aligned Low-NA exposures stitched together. Each exposure removed takes its cost, its cycle time, and one of its defect opportunities with it - in short, fewer exposures are usually better.
ASML’s first commercial High-NA EUV system at Intel’s D1X Fab
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