tag: EUV

Mask Complexity, Cost, And Change
By Gregory Haley - 22 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Experts at the Table: As leading-edge lithography nodes push further into EUV and beyond, mask-making has become one of the most critical and costly aspects of semiconductor manufacturing. At the same time, non-EUV applications are stretching the lifetime of older tools and processes, challenging the industry to find new solutions for both ends of the spectrum. Semiconductor Engineering sat dow... » read more

Laser-Focused Results: Improving EUV Line Edge Roughness With Ion Beam Etching
By Timothy Yang - 22 May, 2025 - Comments: 1

Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography exposed resist patterns can exhibit excessive line edge roughness (LER) and line width roughness (LWR) due to random or shot noise. Increasing the EUV exposure dose can reduce LER/LWR, but it also decreases wafer throughput, which is highly undesirable given the EUV tool’s high operating costs. Ion beam etching (IBE) can directionally etch away roug... » read more

Demonstration Of EUV Scatterometry On A 2D Periodic Interconnect
By Technical Paper Link - 18 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

A new technical paper titled "Coherent EUV scatterometry of 2D periodic structure profiles with mathematically optimal experimental design" was published by researchers at University of Colorado, NIST, Samsung and KMLAbs. Abstract "Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) scatterometry is an increasingly important metrology that can measure critical parameters of periodic nanostructured materials in a fas... » read more

Reflecting On The SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning Symposium 2025
By Harry Levinson - 20 Mar, 2025 - Comments: 0

The mood at this year’s SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning Symposium was decidedly upbeat. The outlook for business is good, due in large measure to expectations of high demand for chips, driven by artificial intelligence (AI). To realize the potential of AI, increases in chip performance and efficiency are needed, which, in turn, requires advanced patterning. In the Symposium’s technic... » read more

Many Options For EUV Photoresists, No Clear Winner
By Katherine Derbyshire - 20 Mar, 2025 - Comments: 3

In EUV lithography, and especially high-numerical-aperture EUV, balancing tradeoffs between resolution, sensitivity and line-width roughness is becoming increasingly difficult. Lithography patterning using extreme UV exposure depends on a resist mask that can simultaneously meet targets of small feature resolution, high sensitivity to EUV wavelength, and acceptable linewidth roughness. Unfor... » read more

EUV’s Future Looks Even Brighter
By Gregory Haley - 20 Feb, 2025 - Comments: 1

The rapidly increasing demand for advanced-node chips to support everything-AI is putting pressure on the industry's ability to meet demand. The need for cutting-edge semiconductors is accelerating in applications ranging from hyperscale data centers powering large language models to edge AI in smartphones, IoT devices, and autonomous systems. But manufacturing those chips relies heavily on ... » 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

Takeaways From The 2024 SPIE Photomask Technology + EUV Conference
By Harry Levinson - 04 Dec, 2024 - Comments: 0

In the autumn, I had the opportunity to attend the 2024 SPIE Photomask Technology and EUV Lithography conferences, collectively referred to as PUV or sometimes BACUS, the latter a reference to the event’s early association with the BACUS organization. This is a key annual event that brings together experts and professionals in photomask technology and EUV lithography. This year’s conference... » read more

Luminary Panel Sees Progress In EUV Pellicle Adoption As Critical For EUV
By Jan Willis - 21 Nov, 2024 - Comments: 0

A significant focus of the 2024 SPIE Photomask and EUV conference was on EUV lithography and high-numerical-aperture (high-NA) EUV lithography, offering the potential to drive resolution to new heights. These EUV solutions bring new challenges such as pellicles, mask inspection, and smaller and smaller minimum mask dimensions. Progress has been impressive, according to lithography luminary Dr. ... » read more

Tuning Design And Process For High-NA EUV Stitching
By Kevin Lucas - 24 Oct, 2024 - Comments: 0

By Kevin Lucas and James Ban Upcoming 14A and 10A process nodes will use high-NA EUV anamorphic scanners, which will require two stitched half-fields to achieve the equivalent wafer exposure area of previous-generation scanners, see figure 1. The lithography patterning at a stitching boundary between two mask exposures will be affected by additional process variation than are encountered in ... » read more

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