The Norwegian-Dutch startup Lace Lithography is betting that neutral helium atoms will take center stage in the next major leap in semiconductor patterning. The photon will run out of steam. It has had an incredible run in semiconductor lithography, but elementary physics proves that chipmakers can’t keep lowering the wavelength of light to increase resolution. Since the wavelength of photons and their energy are inversely proportional, ever shorter wavelengths eventually produce photons energetic enough to create electron cascades in the resist, limiting rather than improving resolution. If not photons, then what? Lace Lithography has what may seem a surprising answer: atoms. The Norwegian startup with a site in Eindhoven harnesses the particle-wave duality of helium atoms to produce patterns with resolutions far beyond what can reasonably be expected from optical lithography. Bits&Chips’ Dutch state of semicon 2026 This article is part of the Bits&Chips special edition on the Dutch state of semicon, published on 23 October 2026. Order your hard copy of the special at info@techwatch.nl. The concept rests on a key principle of quantum mechanics. Every moving particle has a de Broglie wavelength. For helium atoms, that wavelength can be as short as 0.05-0.1 nanometers while their kinetic energy remains extremely low. That sidesteps the problem that ultimately limits photon-based lithography. Instead, Lace uses helium atoms in a metastable excited state. Their short wavelength determines the resolution, while their internal excitation energy – rather than their kinetic energy – is released when they strike the resist, triggering the chemical reaction needed for patterning. Essentially, swapping photons with atoms enables Lace not only to achieve an unprecedented resolution, but also to decouple wavelength from energy. Credit: Lace Lithography Machine learning For Lace chief executive Bodil Holst, the idea has been nearly two decades in the making. A physicist specializing in matter-wave optics, she spent much of her academic career studying helium atom beams as tools for surface science. Lithography wasn’t initially on her radar. That changed during a visit to MIT in 2008, when she met Hank Smith, one of the pioneers of modern lithography. “He told me that EUV might eventually succeed, but even if it did, there would come a point where the industry would need atoms instead of photons. Since only a handful of researchers worldwide worked with helium atom beams, he encouraged me to explore the idea,” Holst explains. She left Smith’s office with one of the few scientific papers ever published on atom lithography. “I was immediately hooked,” she says. Turning that inspirational meeting into a practical technology proved challenging. Over the following years, Holst published several papers on the topic, but none of the approaches worked well enough to become commercially relevant. Even after securing a European Innovation Council Future and Emerging Technologies project in 2020, the central problem remained unresolved. “The physics was understood, but designing masks that produced the desired patterns proved extraordinarily complicated,” says Holst. In atom beam lithography, the mask is an ultrathin membrane containing nanoscale ‘openings’ to define the pattern. The metastable helium atoms hit it from a perpendicular direction. It’s not as simple as some atoms getting blocked by the mask and others passing through, however. Because of their wavelike nature, the atoms produce an interference pattern, necessitating extremely complex calculations to generate a mask pattern that translates into the desired pattern at the target substrate. These calculations proved a bridge too far. Experiment demonstrating the effect of interference. The left pattern was obtained with the wafer close to the mask, the right by increasing that distance, so interference can occur. The increased distance results in a lower half-pitch. Credit: Lace Lithograph