Semiconductor History | Ditzingen — The Sheet-Metal Company That Makes the Light

Inside an EUV lithography machine, a generator drops molten tin into a vacuum chamber fifty thousand times a second.

Each droplet is hit twice by a laser: a pre-pulse to flatten it, then a main pulse that turns it into a plasma hot enough to radiate at 13.5 nanometres.

That laser is a carbon dioxide system built in Ditzingen, a town outside Stuttgart, by a family-owned machine-tool company that also sells sheet-metal cutters.

The amplifier chain takes a seed pulse of a few watts and multiplies it more than ten thousand times across five stages, reaching tens of kilowatts of average power and peaks in the megawatts.

Nobody else supplies this component.

The method is inefficient enough that engineers describe it as ugly, and it remains the only approach that produces EUV at the power a factory needs, which is why a single supplier in Baden-Württemberg sits in the same sentence as export controls and Moore's law.

Trumpf's own leadership has said publicly that if the company fails at this, Moore's law stops. Read that as a statement about the structure of the industry rather than as boasting.

The company has nothing to do with semiconductors in its origins.

Christian Trumpf and two partners bought a Stuttgart workshop called Julius Geiger GmbH in 1923, which made flexible shafts. It stayed a machine-tool business for sixty years, and it is still owned by the Leibinger family and a family foundation, with no outside shareholders.

The turn came in 1985, when Trumpf built its own CO2 laser, the TLF 1000, and decided the following year to use only lasers it made itself.

Sheet-metal cutting paid for four decades of learning how to build a carbon dioxide laser that never drifts, and that accumulated competence is what ASML needed when EUV moved from physics to production.

Three companies effectively run the EUV programme between them: ASML in Veldhoven integrates the machine, Zeiss in Oberkochen makes the mirrors, and Trumpf here makes the light.

People at Trumpf have described the arrangement as something close to a merged company, with open books and engineers moving between the three. That is an unusual way for separate firms to work, and it is roughly what building this machine required.

The headquarters is a glass block with the company name near the roofline, on Johann-Maus-Straße at the edge of a town of about twenty-five thousand people.

It is a working factory and office campus with no public access, and the drive lasers are assembled in cleanrooms behind it.

Photo: TRUMPF, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Trumpf headquarters, Ditzingen, 2021).

Photo: TRUMPF, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (aerial view of the Ditzingen site, 2022).