TSMC's most advanced fab in Hsinchu prints transistors 25,000 times thinner than a human hair — using light that doesn't naturally exist on Earth

TSMC's most advanced fab in Hsinchu prints transistors 25,000 times thinner than a human hair — using light that doesn't naturally exist on Earth

Inside a sealed room in Hsinchu, Taiwan, a machine the size of a city bus is firing droplets of molten tin into a vacuum at 70 metres per second, vaporising each one with a laser, and using the burst of light that erupts to print circuit patterns smaller than a strand of DNA. The light has a wavelength of 13.5 nanometres. It does not occur naturally on Earth’s surface. It is absorbed by air, by glass, by almost everything, which is why the entir…