AMD and IBM this week announced they had produced a working test chip utilizing Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography to produce the first layer of metal connections across the entire chip.

This may sound like something only an electrical engineer could care about, but like Intel’s high-k metal gate breakthrough a year ago, this has a major practical value for customers.

Lithography is the process for building these dime-sized chips with hundreds of millions of transistors. The more transistors that are added, the denser things get and tighter everything gets packed. Each transistor has to be connected with microscopic metal lines, and with smaller manufacturing processes, there is less room for the lines.

The lines between transistors are based directly on the wavelength used to make them. EUV allows for using a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers much shorter than today’s 193nm lithography techniques. So it means IBM and AMD will be able to continue to pack more transistors on a chip while making them smaller at the same time.

It will be a while before EUV makes its debut. AMD expects EUV lithography will be fully qualified for production by 2016, when it makes the move to 22nm manufacturing.