TSMC backs ASML’s plan for bigger masks so its newest machines can print AI’s biggest chips

ASML’s most advanced lithography machines cannot print the largest chips the AI industry currently builds. The company now has a plan to change that, and it has brought TSMC in on it.

The initiative was reported by Reuters on Tuesday and confirmed the same day in a joint announcement from the two companies.

ASML wants to move the industry from the 6-inch photomasks it has used for decades to 12-inch masks, so that its High NA machines can expose a chip the size of today’s biggest data-centre processors in a single shot.

The constraint is optical rather than commercial. High NA systems use anamorphic optics to resolve finer features, and the trade is that they expose roughly half the area of the older generation in one pass.

Processors designed by Nvidia and Google already run to about 800 square millimetres, which sits at the ceiling of what the current tools...

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