An EUV scanner contains roughly 100,000 individual parts. ASML manufactures about 15% of them. The other 85% flow through 5,100 suppliers concentrated, by sovereign-risk geography, in three irreplaceable nodes: a Swabian optical foundation, a Black Forest laser maker, and a San Diego campus that ASML simply bought outright.
The only company on Earth that knows how to grind an EUV mirror. Each one is a stack of ~100 alternating layers of molybdenum and silicon, a few atoms each, deposited on a meter-wide blank polished to a surface roughness of fifty picometers — smaller than a single atom.
If the mirror were enlarged to the area of Germany, its tallest mountain would stand one millimeter high.
Vaporizing tin into a 500,000 K plasma requires firing a CO2 infrared pulse at every passing droplet, fifty thousand times a second, twice. A pre-pulse flattens the 30-micrometer droplet; a main pulse turns it into plasma. Average power tens of kilowatts; peak above a megawatt.
Each driver laser contains, by Trumpf's count, more than 450,000 individual parts. The chain runs five amplifier stages, multiplying the seed signal ten thousandfold.
Founded in 1986 by two UCSD physicists. By 2012 its EUV source was running 50 W in research conditions. ASML acquired it for €1.95 B rather than tolerate a single point of failure outside its own balance sheet.
Its San Diego campus remains the only place on Earth that integrates the tin-droplet generator, Trumpf laser feed, vacuum chamber, and graded multilayer collector mirror into a working EUV light source.