Intel’s Embrace of High-NA EUV Lithography and TSMC’s Reluctance Threatens to Flip the Prevailing Industry Supremacy Paradigm
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With Bernstein analysts calling on their clients to abandon Intel until at least 2030, the erstwhile behemoth in the chipmaking sphere is at a cyclical nadir and is expected to remain there for the next few years as it continues to lose revenue and surrender its margins. Yet, TSMC's immediate reluctance to adopt the latest lithography tech opens a narrow window for Intel to regain its lost glory.
Intel intends to experiment with High-NA Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography within the parameters of its upcoming 18A (1.8 nm) process node before formally incorporating it into its 14A (1.4 nm) manufacturing process.
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In contrast, TSMC seems content with iterative improvements, including multiple masks for greater production efficiency and advanced nano sheet-based transistor designs, for its upcoming A16 process node. The Taiwanese chipmaker also seems to be relying on Super Power Rail backside power delivery, where the power is supplied via the backside of the chip, to boost the performance of its products for AI workloads.
This brings us to the crux of the matter. Each High-NA EUV lithography machine from ASML costs around $385 million. The machine's prohibitive cost is likely to be an important consideration for TSMC's reluctance to go all-in on this technology.
In doing so, however, TSMC risks repeating Intel's mea culpa of sorts when it decided to maximize its bottom-line metric by withholding the expenditure of its then-copious financial resources on newly introduced EUV lithography. At the time, TSMC had gone all-in on EUV lithography and, as a result, continues to reap the rewards of its smart gambit to this day.
Of course, this time around, Intel's Pat Gelsinger has staked the very survival of his company on achieving an
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