[jeroen94704]

Indeed, the difficulty getting a reliable EUV source with enough power is arguably the reason why this technology has been delayed so much. Cymer, the company who was in the process of developing this source, was having so much trouble getting it to work ASML ended up simply buying them so they could focus all their resources on that one problem.

A fall-back scenario, should the tin-vaporizing method fail to deliver, was the use of a Free Electron Laser, which can produce a huge range of wavelengths directly. However, since compact FEL's are not really feasible, this would mean a single source for an entire fab, with complex infrastructure required to distribute the EUV light to multiple scanners. Far from ideal.