The answer is they will do whatever they have to do…
My first ‘real job’ was as laser engineer for the EUVL project at Sandia National labs in 2001, we were funded by a consortium of chip-making companies to develop a source of Extreme Ultraviolet light (13.5nm wavelength) for use in lithography- the scale of the project was huge- we were funded with ~50 million dollars a year. The technology would allow them to make features just about as small as possible in silicon. My first task was to integrate their new 1500Watt laser into the system- replacing the 40Watt laser they had been using… (the most powerful laser I had worked on before this was ~15 Watts!!) – part of my optical alignment process was to use a flashlight to look for smoke from stray light hitting something it shouldn’t. The laser operated at 1.064 micron wavelength- a long enough wavelength to be completely invisible, but short enough wavelength to be focused by the eye lens onto the retina… your first indication that you had gotten a beam in your eye would be a popping sensation as a spot on your retina vaporized and your remaining vision being obscured by blood filling your eyeball… Laser safety was a very serious issue….

That technology is now getting close to being commercialized and will hopefully be used to produce next generation chips… the challenges to make this work efficiently are numerous and difficult.

http://semiengineering.com/moores-law-a-status-report/#.WQIJcDtaqvQ.linkedin

To simplify the flow at 7nm and/or 5nm, chipmakers have been waiting for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, a 13.5nm wavelength technology. EUV was expected at 45nm, but ran into a number of issues that only recently have been resolved. As the power source increases, and throughput continues to rise, it appears that EUV is finally close to being used for commercial production.

Whether close is good enough for mass production remains to be seen. “We have 100 wafers per hour in the factory,” said Hans Meiling, vice president of service and product marketing for EUV at ASML. “We’ll upgrade that later this year to 125 wafers per hour.”

Uptime, meanwhile, has increased to more than 80% based on 11 four-week averages. Meiling said the goal is 90%-plus, which is comparable to immersion lithography. The fact that it has reached this point, though, is nothing short of astounding. This project looks like something straight off the pages of a science-fiction novel.

There are a number of engineering tricks in here. The first is to get a steady stream of tin droplets from a small droplet mechanism. Those droplets are hit with a laser. Then, the laser unit fires again, which is the main pulse. The main laser pulse hits the pancake-like tin droplet and vaporizes it, which, in turn, becomes plasma. The plasma emits EUV light at 13.5nm wavelengths.

“There are 50,000 droplets per second,” Meiling said. “It’s a controlled process. They go in a high velocity stream at hundreds of meters per second. And then we have a CO² laser that hits every droplet. So the rate of the CO² laser is the same as the droplet generator. Every droplet gets turned into a pancake. Because of the CO², it expands to 200- to 400-micron mist, instead of a solid. The first pulse makes it a pancake.”
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Still, there has been progress, thanks in part to a massive investment by multiple companies and a recognition that EUV is much closer to becoming production-worthy. Until last year pellicles were a problem, as well. No one wanted to take responsibility for developing pellicles, so ASML developed its own. And it will take time before EUV moves into production for lines and spaces rather than just mask cuts. But the pieces are now sufficiently developed that from here on the technology will gain some momentum.

How quickly that happens is a function of many other factors. But from a pure lithography standpoint, ASML says that EUV now has a clear path all the way to 1.5nm—and possibly beyond, with the help of higher numerical aperture technology and an anamorphic lens, which can extend the laser across a larger surface like an old CinemaScope projector used for showing widescreen movies.