The Commerce Department said on Monday it will award incentives to xLight, which aims to improve extreme ultraviolet lithography. In exchange, Washington will bag an equity stake large enough to make it the firm’s biggest shareholder.
Dutch outfit ASML remains the sole global supplier of EUV machines, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars apiece. xLight only aims to overhaul one bit of the EUV process, the lasers that carve microscopic patterns into silicon wafers. The plan is to bolt its new light sources onto ASML kit.
xLight marks a second shot for Troubled Chipzilla’s former chief executive Pat [Kicking] Gelsinger, who was fired last year after the outfit’s finances sagged and a manufacturing expansion ran aground. Gelsinger is now executive chairman of xLight’s board.
Company chairman Pat Gelsinger said “I wasn’t done yet” and added “This is deeply personal to me.”
Plenty of current and former officials have slated Gelsinger for overpromising when he was Chipzilla chief and failing to deliver after the government agreed to shovel billions of dollars in subsidies into the company.
The xLight pact taps 2022 Chips and Science Act funds earmarked for early-stage tech outfits. It is the first Chips Act award of Trump’s second term and remains a preliminary agreement that could still change.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said, “This partnership would back a technology that can fundamentally rewrite the limits of chipmaking.”
Some analysts have taken swipes at the administration’s habit of ploughing money directly into companies like Chipzilla, accusing officials of state capitalism. Lutnick insists the push helps spark critical industries and reel in private-sector partners.
xLight’s plan is certainly cheeky. The startup wants to build massive free-electron lasers powered by particle accelerators to create a more powerful, precise light source for fabs. Each unit will measure about 100 metres by 50 metres and sit outside the fab as a utility-scale system. The $150 million injection should help xLight produce its first wafers by 2028, Gelsinger said.
The company is led by chief executive Nicholas Kelez, who previously worked in quantum computing and in government research labs. xLight raised $40 million this summer from investors, including Playground Global, where Gelsinger is a general partner.
ASML’s top lasers spit out extreme ultraviolet light at roughly 13.5 nanometres. xLight wants to slash that to as little as 2 nanometres. If it pulls that off, chip makers could etch even tinier lines onto wafers.
Such precision could nudge the industry along the path set by Moore’s law, which says transistor counts per chip should double every two years.
Gelsinger said “We are here to wake up Moore’s Law. It’s been taking a nap.”
He reckons the technology might boost wafer-processing efficiency by 30 to 40 per cent and cut the energy consumption of current light sources.
“If this company is successful, we will change semiconductors. We can improve the economics of today’s EUV and enable tomorrow’s EUV,” he said.
The announcement reflects rising enthusiasm inside the Trump administration for new ways to strengthen advanced semiconductor production in the US.
In October, Substrate, a semiconductor startup backed by investor Peter Thiel, said it had raised $100 million to develop US fabs, including an EUV tool similar to xLight’s. The Commerce Department has also been leaning on chip makers such as TSMC to boost its US investments.
Gelsinger said he floated the xLight idea to Lutnick in February, before Lutnick joined the startup and before his Senate confirmation. He told Lutnick it could help the administration bring more chipmaking back to the US, since most advanced chips are produced in Asia.
“He was very intrigued,” Gelsinger said.
