Every part of this technology is astounding and you need a reasonable basis in physics to truly appreciate just how astounding it is. And the tolerances are so ridiculously precise, it boggles the mind.

Even before you get to the lithography machine you need silicon. For a long time we've known how this is done. You create what's called a boule, which is where you create a cylinder of almost pure silicon by seeding molten silicon with a crystal and slowly forming it. You then cut the boule into the silicon discs we often see. That machining and polishing itself has to be super-precise.

But I can remember when the tolerance for impurities was at 1 part per 300 million. I read recently that even 1 part per billion is now too impure. And that makes sense. The biggest chips are what? 80 billion transistors? I seem to remember NVidia makes chips in that range (or rather TSMC does for NVidia). At 1ppb that might make ruining your chip just too likely.

So my point is that there's a whole industry to make super-pure silicon which itself took amazing advancements and without that this machine would be a lot less useful.

Another part that amazes me is just how pervasive multiple layers on chips have become. I can remember when that was novel. The upper layers are made by cheaper machines with EUV reserved for a transistor "base layer" where all the interconnects really are.

It's amazing just how many problems had to be solved to make this posible.