When Brienna Hall joined ASML last year as a customer service engineer (a position she jokingly calls “fancy mechanics”), she had no idea how essential her job would become.
And for most, the 29-year-old’s work for one of the world’s biggest tech giants remains a well-kept secret.
At the Boise, Idaho, chip plant, Hall puts on a clean-room bunny suit and works on an extraordinary machine in an environment 100 times cleaner than a hospital operating room.
His job is to maintain the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine, a piece of advanced technology responsible for producing the world’s most sophisticated microchips.
These machines, which cost between $170 million and $370 million each, are built using cutting-edge technology previously considered impossible.
They are essential to modern life, powering devices such as phones, computers, televisions and even cars.
“I thought I had the best job ever,” Hall told the Wall Street Journal. “I didn’t process the fact that this work is necessary for our entire world to exist as it does.”
ASML, the Dutch company that produces all EUV machines, is the backbone of the chip industry.
Brienna Hall works as a Customer Support Engineer at ASML, a vital company that most people don’t know about. It maintains EUV lithography machines, crucial for producing advanced microchips.
Hall’s work ensures these machines run smoothly, enabling the production of semiconductors that power devices such as phones, computers, televisions and even cars.
Hall, located at Micron Technology’s manufacturing facility in Boise, ensures these machines run smoothly, enabling the production of semiconductors that power the modern world.
EUV machines, a scientific miracle, It started 40 years ago in a small leaky shed in the Netherlands with the founding of ASML.
Back then, using extreme ultraviolet light to print chips seemed impossible and required decades of effort, massive funding, and innovative science.
EUV technology involves vaporizing droplets of molten tin and using twin laser pulses (50,000 times per second) to flatten them and then explode them into plasma, emitting EUV light.
This light is collected by ultra-soft mirrors and directed to etch billions of microscopic transistor patterns onto silicon wafers.
The current wavelength of 13.5 nanometers enables chip resolutions 10,000 times finer than human hair.
The development of EUV lithography took decades. ASML delivered its first EUV system in 2010, its 100th in 2020, and shipped 42 machines just last year.
Despite their importance, only six companies own these machines, while many others depend on them indirectly.
ASML technology is essential for products like iPhones and AI data centers, and companies like Apple and Nvidia rely on its accuracy through manufacturers like TSMC.
Maintenance of these $370 million machines is essential. ASML employs 10,000 customer support engineers worldwide to ensure they are up and running around the clock.
Outages can arise from unexpected factors like earthquakes, or even methane gas from dairy farms, as Intel once discovered.
Hall and his companions are ASML’s frontline troops, keeping these indispensable machines operational and advancing the modern technological world.
ASML is the only company producing EUV machines and they are essential to the modern technology industry.
Pictured: Workers in front of a ‘High NA EUV’ lithography system at an Intel facility in Hillsboro, Oregon, USA.
Signs of Brienna Hall’s future success at ASML were evident long before she joined the company.
Hall, now 29, grew up in Seattle and was a Girl Scout who loved perfecting knots. She later became president of the Edmonds College rocket club while earning her associate’s degree.
At Washington State University, he majored in materials science and engineering, transcribed notes for a quantum mechanics textbook, and spent his free time weaving and putting together complex puzzles.
He also planned camping trips even though he didn’t like camping per se.
These experiences prepared her for the meticulous and problem-solving nature of working on a machine with over 100,000 parts.
“You’re always solving problems,” Alex Jordan, another ASML engineer, told the Journal. ‘How can I be more efficient? Where can I optimize?
ASML seeks disciplined, detail-oriented engineers for customer-facing roles, and Hall’s technical skills and temperament were the perfect match.
When his professor heard that a semiconductor company was hiring, Hall submitted his resume and soon received an email from ASML. The promise of travel and hands-on work was enough to seal the deal.
His first big trip was a month in Taiwan at the ASML training center where he learned the intricacies of the EUV machine. He honed his skills through months of Fab Ready 2 courses and traveled to Taiwan, San Diego, and Germany.
It took almost a year of apprenticeship before Hall was cleared to work on the EUV machine independently.
Each part, like the scanner and laser, has its peculiarities. At Micron’s factory in Boise, the scanner is nicknamed Monica, after the “cleanliness freak” character on the sitcom Friends, “because everything has to be perfect,” Hall said.
Pictured: The ultraviolet lithography process.
When not traveling to different continents, he works in the ASML office near the Micron campus, working 12-hour shifts from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Some days, Hall goes directly to the factory to do hands-on work. In others, you monitor the machine remotely from your desktop, analyzing data on multiple screens.
“I’m sure the machine won’t self-combust,” she said.
Once she is convinced that the system is stable, she shifts her focus to planning tasks for the next “scheduled downtime,” a routine maintenance period designed to avoid costly, unplanned outages.
Micron’s roots run deep in Idaho. Nearly half a century ago, four entrepreneurs, including an investor who was a local potato magnate, founded the company in the basement of a dentist’s office.
Now, with a $15 billion investment, Micron is returning cutting-edge memory manufacturing to American soil. This new factory, which will dwarf the Empire State Building with its concrete foundation, will cover an area equivalent to 10 football fields.
Adjacent to this construction site is Micron’s existing research factory, which houses a 300,000-pound behemoth: an EUV machine brought in from the Netherlands on three separate 747 cargo planes.
Brienna Hall admits she can’t go more than a few days without checking out the factory’s EUV machine, captivated by its capabilities.
“By then I get itchy and look for a reason to come in,” he said.
Upon entering the white room, Hall undergoes a meticulous transformation. Covered from head to toe, a precaution against even the smallest speck of dust that could wreak havoc on delicate machinery.
To minimize interruptions, limit your water consumption and give up coffee altogether.
Inside the factory, under the dim yellow lights, it is hot, noisy and disorienting, but none of that bothers her.
“When I work on the tool and solve a problem, everything else falls silent,” he explains. ‘It’s about focusing and doing that one thing. There’s nothing better than fixing it.’
On one visit, Hall noticed a problem in the water line: a small distortion in a hose that could become a bigger problem.
It took almost a year of apprenticeship before Hall was cleared to work on the EUV machine independently.
Some days, Hall goes directly to the factory to do hands-on work. In others, you monitor the machine remotely from your desktop, analyzing data on multiple screens.
After getting the OK, he grabbed two orange buckets from Home Depot, drained the line, replaced the Teflon hose, and installed thermal sensors to monitor it.
The solution was simple but essential to avoid downtime for the multi-million dollar machine.
“It’s not glamorous,” Hall said, “but I take pride in keeping my machines running for our customers.”