Inside the Chip-Making Machine the World Can’t Live Without
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Microchips are used everywhere.

In cars, gaming consoles, medical devices, microwaves, wind turbines, toothbrushes. There are microchips in whatever you're using to listen to this podcast. And to make the most cutting edge of those chips, you need an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine or an EUV machine. Pretty much everything that plugs in now has one of our chips in it. Pretty much everything that plugs in has something that's gone through a lithography machine.

That's Brianna Hall. She talked to me on her lunch break during my rare tour to see one of these machines. Hall is a customer support engineer on one of the few hundred EUV lithography machines in existence. These machines are ludicrously expensive. Each one costs a few hundred million dollars. And they're all made by one company, ASML, Originally Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography.

These machines have become indispensable, and they depend on the invisible work of customer support engineers like Brianna Hall. I just thought my job was awesome. I didn't process the fact that this job is necessary for our entire world to exist as it does.

From The Wall Street Journal, this is The Science of Success, a look at how today's successes could lead to tomorrow's innovations. I'm Ben Cohen. I write a column for the journal about how people, ideas, and teams work and when they thrive. Today, I dive into what might just be the most important machine ever made and get a behind-the-scenes look at the very intricate job of maintaining it. To understand what an EUV lithography machine does, let's review how microchips work.

Microchips are made up of a dense network of tiny, think microscopic, transistors built in layers on top of some kind of semiconducting material, usually silicon. The existential question of the semiconductor industry is how to pack more and more of those transistors on chips to make them faster and faster.

The answer? Shorter and shorter wavelengths of light. ASML's first lithography tools created light at wavelengths of 436 nanometers. The current machines have shrunk that number to 13.5 nanometers. That allows them to fabricate chips at resolutions 10,000 times finer than human hair. The process is complex and was built with scientific technologies that sound more like science fiction.

But if we break it down to basics, first, the machine has to produce beams of extreme ultraviolet light, which doesn't occur naturally on Earth. To make it, tiny droplets of tin are injected into a vacuum chamber. Then, a first pulse of amplified laser light flattens each droplet, and then a second pulse obliterates the droplets, creating a plasma that emits extreme ultraviolet light.

That beam of extreme ultraviolet light is then shot into another vacuum chamber where it bounces around and reflects off a template with the chip pattern. And then it prints that pattern multiple times on wafers of silicon. Easy.

The process is incredibly intricate and involves breakthroughs so improbable that they were once dismissed as impossible. And maintaining that machine is delicate, constant, and extremely precise. But for Brianna Hall, it's just another day at work. I'm a fancy mechanic. I fix machines. I just do it in a very clean space.

When we come back, I'll go inside that very clean space and tell you about the rare behind-the-scenes peek I got at one of these machines and the woman responsible for maintaining it. Um, I think I just won my taxes. Yeah? I just switched to H&R Block in about one minute. All I had to do was drag and drop last year's return into H&R Block, and bam, my information is automatically there. So I don't have to go digging around for all my old papers to switch? Nope. Sounds like we just leveled up our tax game.

Switching to H&R Block is easy. Just drag and drop your last return. It's better with Block. The EUV machine Brianna Hall maintains is in a fabrication plant, or FAB, in Boise, Idaho at the headquarters of Micron Technology, which bought the machine from ASML. Some days, Hall goes straight to the FAB. Other days, she's at her desk, looking at numbers on her multiple screens.

Once I'm sure the machine isn't going to self-combust, I usually transition over into preparation actions. She plans a series of actions that she'll perform during the scheduled down, a routine outage for preventative maintenance to minimize the risk of an unscheduled down. After all, the only thing more satisfying than fixing a machine is having a machine that doesn't need to be fixed.

The day I was there, nothing needed to be fixed, but she was taking me to see the machine, so away we went. In order to go inside, you have to be clean, like super clean. The air inside the clean room of a fab is 100 times cleaner than that of a hospital operating room, which meant I had to hop into a bunny suit.

To be fair, Hall warned me about the bunny suit. It's a white jumpsuit, hood, and mask. No fluffy tail or ears. Not super comfortable. Still, the bunny suit is necessary. Even a speck of dust can have disastrous consequences in a chip fab.

The EUV tool is incredibly precise. Imagine directing a laser beam from your house and hitting a ping-pong ball on the moon. That precise. ASML teamed up with a German optical company to develop the mirrors used to reflect the light. These mirrors are so flat that if they were scaled up to the size of Germany itself, their largest imperfection would be less than a millimeter.

Once we were inside, Hall looked at that day's service plan. We walked through a maze until she stopped, removed the doors of a cabinet, and squeezed inside the machine. She noticed a problem. We have an AP to deal with this. It's not scheduled for three weeks. AP, or action plan. Hall explained the situation to a Micron supervisor. A blockage in the water line meant the hose wasn't cooling properly, and now it was having some heat issues. The supervisor authorized her to fix the problem on the spot.

And that is when she reached for two Home Depot buckets. I've never done it this way before. We'll see. Okay. Those two orange pails sell for a few dollars at the hardware store, and she needed them to service a machine that sells for a few hundred million dollars. She drained the water line until both tubs were almost full. Then she replaced the hose, attached thermal sensors for monitoring, climbed out of the machine, and shut the door behind her.

To me, it all looked like an extremely stressful situation. But to Hall, this was the best part of the job. When I'm on the tool and fixing a problem, it's like everything else goes quiet for me. And I'm just focused on getting that one thing done. When I'm problem solving, there's nothing better than just zeroing in on that problem until it's solved. That's fun. And that's it for The Science of Success. Today's show was produced by Charlotte Gartenberg.

We had help from Catherine Millsop and Chris Sinsley. I'm Ben Cohen for The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening.