Exploring The Frontiers Of Lithography And Patterning: Highlights From SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning 2026

By Travis Brist - 19 Mar, 2026 - Comments: 0

Leading‑edge system-on-chip (SoC) designs at deep submicron nodes are stretching lithography and patterning capabilities across the entire manufacturing flow. Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography has become central to printing advanced features, using high‑power pulsed lasers to generate a plasma light source and reflective optics to project mask patterns onto the wafer. As error budgets t... » read more

Faster Mask Synthesis With GPUs

By Travis Brist - 18 Dec, 2025 - Comments: 0

Design teams face rising pressure to deliver larger chips with higher transistor densities on tighter schedules using advanced node processing. The computing demands of modern applications, especially those making heavy use of AI, are extending pressure beyond design to every step of the development flow, including manufacturing, where photolithography and mask synthesis must keep pace. This po... » read more

Charting The Frontiers Of Photomask Technology And Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography

By Travis Brist - 23 Oct, 2025 - Comments: 0

The enormous computing demands of AI and high-performance computing (HPC) applications are putting intense pressure on every aspect of chip development. Challenges arise during architecture, design, and verification, persist through the manufacturing process, and extend to post-silicon lifecycle management as chips are deployed in the field. Lithography, the fabrication step of shining light... » read more

More Than Meets The Eye: Trends In Lithography

By Travis Brist - 23 Jan, 2025 - Comments: 0

Lithography, once the exclusive domain of artists and printmakers, also lies at the heart of integrated circuit (IC) production. The process of shining light on a substrate through a photomask to control exposure has been around since the 1960s and has been the key part of improving IC fabrication process resolution. At the time, the light sources used were in the human-visible spectrum, which ... » read more