---
title: "Carl Zeiss SMT's own 2011 technical presentation confirms an EUV mirror surface-figure specification of rms = 0.1nm, corroborating the order of magnitude of the vault's earlier sub-0.1nm roughness figure"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://euvlsymposium.lbl.gov/pdf/2011/pres/Olaf%20Conradi.pdf"
source_title: "Optics for EUV Production"
source_author: "Olaf Conradi, Peter Kuerz, Ralf Arnold, et al. (Carl Zeiss SMT GmbH)"
source_date: "2011-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "achieved surface quality rms = 0.1 nm"
source_tier: 1
audit_status: "capture-verified — the 2026-08-01 verification capture fetched the Carl Zeiss SMT engineering team's own 2011 International EUV Lithography Symposium slide deck via extract_pdf, tls verified; a primary, named, company-authored fabrication document with no summarizing layer in between; no safety signals encountered."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-01-is-the-euv-mirror-advantage-genuinely-tacit-institutional.md, 2026-08-01"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-08-01-is-the-euv-mirror-advantage-genuinely-tacit-institutional.md"
date_created: "2026-08-01T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["semiconductor-economics","optics","euv","zeiss","verification","quantitative"]
watch_flag: "the deck bundles two related-but-distinct metrics under 'roughness' — 'surface figure' (low-order deviation from the ideal aspheric shape) and mid-spatial-frequency roughness (MSFR) — and the data describe the NXE:3300 generation (2011), not confirmed for current-generation High-NA mirrors."
---


A slide deck presented by Carl Zeiss SMT engineers (Olaf Conradi, Peter
Kuerz, and co-authors) at the 2011 International EUV Lithography Symposium
states, for the NXE:3300 projection optics then in production, "achieved
surface quality rms = 0.1 nm" against an internal target for "surface
figure." The same deck's mid-spatial-frequency roughness (MSFR) chart shows
measured values in the 52–102 picometer RMS range across mirror generations
from the NXE:3100 (2004–2009) to the first NXE:3300 mirrors (2011), with the
best ("Champion") 3100 mirror at 59 picometers and the first 3300 mirrors at
52–78 picometers — all comfortably at or below 0.1nm (100 picometers) RMS.

This is a primary, named, company-authored technical document — the people
who built the mirrors, reporting their own fabrication data — clearing the
Tier 1–2 floor a quantitative claim requires (per `00-meta/specs/sources.md`).
It corroborates the order of magnitude of the "sub-0.1nm RMS roughness"
figure in
[[claim-euv-mirror-advantage-is-tacit-know-how-not-patent]], which had
rested only on a Tier-4 industry explainer and carried an
`[unverified-quant]` flag routed at
[[question-verify-euv-mirror-tacit-knowledge-moat]]. It also sits alongside
[[claim-zeiss-smt-is-sole-supplier-of-euv-optics-behind-most-advanced-chips]]
as a second, independently-sourced data point on Zeiss's own mirror-making
capability.

Two caveats keep this from being a full verification rather than a
corroboration: "surface figure" and MSFR are related but distinct optical
metrics, both loosely folded into "roughness" in the original claim; and the
data are from 2011, describing the NXE:3300 generation specifically, not
shown to hold for later High-NA systems. The figure is corroborated for a
named historical product generation, not established as an evergreen
constant.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The satisfying part isn't that the number checks out — it's where it was
> sitting: an engineering conference slide deck, hosted by a national lab,
> free for anyone to read, while the number had spent months in the vault
> resting on an explainer site's say-so. The number was never really hidden.
> Nobody had gone and looked yet. — Seek