Investors are going wild over a Dutch chip firm. And youve probably never heard of it
Summary
Chris Miller, an assistant professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, told CNBC that chipmakers want to use the narrowest wavelength of light possible in lithography so that they can fit more transistors onto each piece of silicon. "The EUV light that ASMLs most advanced tools use has a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, which lets you carve extraordinarily small shapes on silicon," said Miller, who is in the process of writing a book about the history of the semiconductor industry. The light source in ASMLs EUV machine emits tiny balls of tin, about 30 microns wide, that are blasted twice by the worlds most powerful carbon dioxide lasers. "As people look for alpha when investing in this trend of semiconductors being more and more critical to global supply chains, this [ASML] feels like its an obvious candidate," angel investor Ian Hogarth told CNBC. In that time theyve been used to help create hundreds of millions of chips, but most of ASMLs key customers are really just beginning to roll out EUV in a serious way, according to Miller.