Conn. manufacturer at core of revolutionary chip in iPhones
“EUV took over 20 years to get to where it is today. That we’re here in Connecticut. It’s amazing the technology that is developed and the use of that technology in everyone’s lives. ... Now companies are using it in their advertisements or product announcements to show that they have an edge.” Bill Amalfitano, former ASML general manager
WILTON — Bill Amalfitano retired in August from the Wilton factory where, as general manager, he built up one of the largest employers in Connecticut, with a workforce of roughly 2,000 people now.
But Amalfitano carries an echo of ASML around — and soon will millions of people — in the mobile phone he keeps at hand.
ASML is riding a fresh wave of renown, after Apple began selling on Friday its iPhone 12 that includes a key component of Connecticut craftsmanship. The microscopic circuits cramming the cellphone’s small chips — approaching 12 billion transistors on each — were imprinted using lithography machines made by ASML, which include parts made at the Netherlands-based company’s big Wilton factory.
The A14 chips made for Apple by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing are produced through the “extreme ultraviolet” process pioneered by ASML. Amalfitano sees EUV technology as the semiconductor industry’s biggest breakthrough perhaps since the early 1970s, when ASML predecessor company Perkin-Elmer introduced optical projection scanner technology in Wilton for the U.S. Air Force.
“EUV took over 20 years to get to where it is today,” Amalfitano said. “That we’re here in Connecticut. It’s amazing the technology that is developed and the use of that technology in everyone’s lives. ... Now companies are using it in their advertisements or product announcements to show that they have an edge.”
Inside machines approaching the size of a backyard shed, EUV focuses beams of light to print circuitry five nanometers in width on silicon wafers joggled in precise patterns by robotic arms, a scale not possible before. A sheet of paper measures roughly 100,000 nanometers in thickness.
“EUV light is something you do not find running around,” said Mike Lercel, ASML’s director of corporate strategy and marketing who lives in Redding. “The EUV tool has to be in a vacuum chamber, because the light is absorbed by anything — including just having atmosphere around it. On top of that, because the wavelengths are so short, the optics have to be incredibly precise.”
In a June piece published by The Brookings Institution, a Georgetown University research fellow likened the precision of EUV beams to nailing an apple on the moon with an arrow launched from Earth, a technological feat that has triggered controls on the U.S. export of the machines to China on security concerns. As part of last summer’s Semicon West conference held virtually, ASML received a technical award from the Semi Americas trade group for helping EUV become commercially viable.
Despite ASML’s Wilton plant housing perhaps the safest environment in Connecticut from a virus transmission perspective — its massive clean-room sections are walled off from contaminants and employees inside are covered headto-foot in protective suits — the company has had a few COVID-19 cases in its local workforce.
All have recovered according to George Gomba, senior director in Wilton who has overseen operations there since Amalfitano’s retirement, in addition to leading an advance prototyping initiative.
ASML continues to allow employees to choose whether to return to the Wilton plant or work remotely, he added, and anticipates ASML will maintain a work-from-home option for the immediate future and perhaps long term. ASML also kept its internship program in place through online virtual channels.
“We went to a skeleton crew in the early days of the pandemic,” Gomba said. “Growing all these applications and being able to put all this infrastructure in place to be able to accommodate everyone working from home, maybe even new models for society and security and so forth. It’s an enabler.”