Elon Musk's Terafab will get its first EUV lithography tool in the middle of next year, reports Tim Culpan, citing sources with knowledge of the matter. But considering that the shell of the firm's development fab will not be completed until late 2027 and that tools will only begin to be moved in later that year, according to SemiAnalysis, the scanner will sit idle for some time.
Tesla broke ground on its research fab on the north campus of Giga Texas near Austin this past April. SemiAnalysis expects the building to be completed in 15 months and predicts it will take Tesla a further six months to install equipment and production tools, after which it will be able to start processing wafers, or rather experimenting with chip production to get the team prepared for completion of the Terafab volume fab phase 1.
Given how hard it is to get an ASML Twinscan NXE EUV lithography tool these days, storing it for several months before putting it to use may sound like an expensive slack period, but it's not the significant financial problem for Terafab that it would be for a traditional chipmaker.
The projected delivery of a conventional EUV lithography system to Terafab also indicates that while Elon Musk has praised free electron laser (FEL) light sources for lithography tools, the first-generation efforts of his semiconductor production company will rely on more traditional equipment. This is not particularly surprising, as Terafab is set to use Intel's 14A manufacturing technology .
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