The semiconductor industry faces its biggest technical challenge yet

The machine fires 50,000 droplets of tin into a vacuum chamber every second. A laser heats each drop to 220,000°C, 40 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. This transforms droplets into plasma that emits light of extremely short wavelength (extreme ultraviolet, or euv). The narrow beam of light is reflected, using a series of mirrors that are smooth down to tens of picometres (trillionths of a metre) to hit a mask that contains blueprints of the chip’s circuits.