The company is proposing a single platform approach with series of machines expected to show improving characteristics that will provide flexibility for the insertion of EUVL in the chip manufacturing process, and a gradual migration of the platform from pre-production to mass-production status.

This flexibility will suit a technology which is not yet certain to take over from optical lithography, the current technology for making chips, but which is increasingly looking like one of very few approaches that has a chance of extending Moore's Law.

Martin van den Brink, executive vice president for products and technology told an audience of senior executives as the IMEC Technology Forum that "EUV is the cost effective successor of 193-nm lithography below 20-nm." and that ASML believes it can extend EUV down to sub-5nm.

The company took delivery of a new [power] source in May and is "ready to integrate a system" van den Brink said.

This will be the first example of ASML's NXE platform of EUV lithography machines; the NXE3100 capable of between 60 and 100 wafers per hour throughput. This will have a numerical aperture of 0.25 and should be capable of 28-nm resolution, the same as is being achieved on the EUV Advanced Development Tool installed in IMEC, but at a commercial throughput.