You’ve probably heard that chip-making machines are insanely complex. But what actually happens inside an EUV lithography system?

Turns out, it doesn’t use a laser or a lightbulb — it fires 50,000 tiny tin droplets per second, blasts them into plasma, and generates extreme ultraviolet light with a wavelength of just 13.5 nanometers. Then it reflects that light through 11 flawless mirrors in a vacuum — all while keeping errors smaller than the width of a single atom.