The tiny scale of our technology
What happens at ASML might be nanometer sized, but it has a huge impact.
Just how small is “nano ”?
Working at the nanoscale
A microchip the size of your fingernail contains billions of transistors, so it’s easy to understand just how small the features on a microchip need to be.
You’ll often see microchip features measured in nanometers. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, or a millionth of a millimeter. For comparison, a human red blood cell is 7,000 nanometers in diameter, and the average virus is 14 nanometers.
The smaller the features in the patterns that lithography systems can create, the more transistors chipmakers can fit on a microchip, and the more the microchip can do. That’s why, as part of ASML, you can help develop technology (like our systems that use extreme ultraviolet light, or EUV) that will enable the scale of the smallest feature to be reduced even further.
Ready to work at the nanoscale?
ASML sets Guinness World Record for the smallest advertisement
ASML’s lithography machines are used to create microchips on the nanometer scale (that’s a millionth of a millimeter), which in turn enables electronic devices to become cheaper, faster and more powerful. So, it may come as little surprise that ASML has set the Guinness World Records title for the world’s smallest advertisement, created with one of our lithography machines.
