Intel invests in firm that promises to make EUV easier and more efficient

Intel's Capital division regularly splashes cash to promising tech ventures. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested in over 1,500 companies, and it currently has stakes in around 350 firms. Interestingly, The Register noticed Intel is now investing in companies that make chips, rather than those that will use or accelerate demand for Intel's own processors or other products.

Among others, Intel invested in Lyncean Technologies, a California-based company that claims it can optimize extreme ultraviolet (EUV) process technology to scale down chips to 2nm. Lyncean believes it can make EUV a lot easier by using a completely new electron beam accelerator that produces UV light with laser-like characteristics. This system replaces the "bulb" like light source that's used by ASML's current EUV machines, it promises to be cheaper and more energy efficient:

For a number of years, the light source needed to make chips has limited the reduction of chip designs but Lyncean has successfully simulated the miniaturization of government research technology – currently monster machines in huge facilities that require megawatts of power – down to something that could fit into a normal-sized lab room.

The money from Intel will be used to build a real machine and Feser is confident that in under three years, his company can produce a machine that will make a 2nm chip manufacturing process possible. From there, everyone else would need to catch up and redesign chip components to work at such a tiny scale.