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After Intel's fanfare and celebrations for its successful installation and start-up of the world's most advanced semiconductor fabrication machines earlier this year, called high NA EUV scanners, an eecutive from the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) shared that his firm can use existing low NA machines for a couple of years at the least. Intel recently received the first such machine, and the firm's current road map sees the equipment come online to manufacture a variant of the 14A manufacturing process node.

At an event in Amsterdam, the TSMC executives shared their thoughts on the need to expand chip manufacturing capacity in the continent and upgrade existing machines. Among the executives who spoke, TSMC's senior vice president for business development, Kevin Zhang, shared that while he was impressed with the high NA EUV capability, the sticker price of the machine was a bit too high for his comfort.

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TSMC Executive Believes A16 Chip Process Technology Can Be Produced Without Needing High NA EUV Scanners

Even though low NA EUV scanners are commonplace now due to advanced technologies like TSMC and Intel's 3nm manufacturing processes, before EUV scanners, firms had relied extensively on DUV machines to manufacturer 7nm and later chips.

Chip makers can manufacture advanced chips with older machines provided they split the original design into multiple parts during the process. The comments made by TSMC's SVP in Amsterdam appear to conform to this principle as well since he believes that TSMC can avoid using high NA EUV machines until it starts manufacturing products with its A16 process technology.

Currently, semiconductor process technology families use nanometers to measure transistor dimensions.