ASML has started a decade-long program to shrink printable features to 5nm from the 8nm that high-NA tools can deliver, in a technology it calls Hyper NA.
A paper written with optics partner Zeiss and published in the Journal of Micro/Nanopatterning, Materials and Metrology describes raising the numerical aperture from today’s 0.55 to at least 0.75. That could print features more than a third smaller than high-NA.
Zeiss said it can already build the mirrors to the required precision. The design keeps the same 13.5nm tin-plasma light source and roughly the same machine size. Mask-side angles rise only about a degree over high NA, so existing mask infrastructure would need minimal changes.
The authors concluded that polarization control offers limited value for many two-dimensional patterns once light losses are weighed.
Cost is the open question. The paper puts a Hyper NA machine at $724 million, above the high-NA systems that are only now entering production.
The timeline matters for planning across the industry. If Hyper NA arrives around 2036, it would follow high-NA by roughly a decade, meaning the current generation has to carry leading-edge logic for most of that span. The gap gives toolmakers and chipmakers room to decide how much of the next node depends on new optics rather than on packaging and materials.
