How on earth can one physically beam that kind of detail down on to a chip the size of a few centimetres? With one of the most expensive machines in the world. The TWINSCAN NXE:3600D—made by ASML, a Dutch business which used to be part of Philips—costs hundreds of millions of dollars. That might sound excessive, given it is ultimately just bouncing light around a box, but this is no ordinary light and no ordinary box. After all, recall that the transistors TSMC wants to make are so small they are quite literally invisible, so a conventional wavelength laser and a series of lenses will no
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