reticle limit
Beginner
The largest area a chipmaking machine can print in one shot, about the size of a postage stamp. One chip can’t be bigger than this.
Novice
The largest area a lithography machine (the tool that prints a chip’s patterns onto the wafer) can expose in one shot, roughly 800 to 860 mm². A chip made as one piece of silicon must fit inside it.
Expert
Set by the scanner’s exposure field, 26 mm × 33 mm on current tools. Dies near the limit yield poorly and few fit on a wafer; going beyond it takes stitching several exposures, splitting into chiplets, or wafer-scale integration.
Explained in AI accelerators and datacenter (Industries).