ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
So there's this new, next-generation way to make microchips. It's behind the most advanced chips in the world. Its name? Extreme ultraviolet lithography. Planet Money's Jeff Guo got a rare up-close look at this technology.
JEFF GUO, BYLINE: Deep inside a cavernous lab on a somewhat secretive research campus in San Diego, I'm about to witness something very few other humans have ever seen.
ALEX SCHAFGANS: We're going to have to put on some hard hats now.
GUO: Yes. Yes, please.
SCHAFGANS: Watch your step here.
GUO: Alex Schafgans is a physicist at a Dutch company called ASML. ASML is the only company in the world that has mastered how to make microchips using a special kind of light called extreme ultraviolet. To even generate extreme ultraviolet light, the least complicated way anyone's figured out is to essentially blow stuff up with a giant laser. To show me what that process looks like, Alex walks me over to one of their test chambers. It's like a metal sewer pipe with a plexiglass window. Inside, a nozzle is shooting out a stream of molten tin.
SCHAFGANS: And we've lit up the chamber with a flashlight so that you can visually see this spiderweb-looking string of droplets.
GUO: Holy - wait. (Gasping) It does. It looks like a very thin spiderweb.
As these tin droplets fly through the machine, they get blasted by the giant laser, and they explode, turn into a plasma hotter than the surface of the sun. That creates a flash of extreme ultraviolet, which is the special light that allows this machine to etch the tiniest circuits for the most advanced microchips on the planet. It is an improbable-sounding technology, and it took nearly four decades. But the story doesn't begin with ASML. Like so many other breakthrough technologies, this one was originally nurtured by the U.S. government. One of the first people to propose that laser plasma explosions could be the future of microchips was Andy Hawryluk. He gave a presentation on it back in the 1980s.
ANDY HAWRYLUK: It was not well-received. So many naysayers got up and basically said, stupid idea, crazy idea, no, it'll never happen.
GUO: At the time, Andy was a government scientist. He worked at one of the big U.S. nuclear weapons and national security labs, and the U.S. government was willing to bet millions of dollars on this long shot idea. That bet paid off. By the early 2000s, the government labs were able to prove that extreme ultraviolet chipmaking could actually work. The final step was for a company to take this technology out of the lab and into the real world. But there wasn't really an American company that could do that, which is why the U.S. ultimately passed the torch onto a Dutch company, ASML.
MARC HIJINK: Well, that's an expression, but you could also say that the U.S. dropped the ball on lithography.
GUO: (Laughter).
HIJINK: Sorry for being blunt in a Dutch way.
GUO: Very Dutch, yes.
Marc Hijink is a Dutch journalist. He recently wrote a book on ASML. And he says commercializing a technology, that tends to be the hardest part. In this case, ASML spent almost two decades and more than $6 billion trying to bring this technology from a prototype to the factory floor. In 2017, they finally succeeded. ASML now has a monopoly on the cutting-edge way to manufacture microchips, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Jeff Guo, NPR News.
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