tag: lithography

AL 2012 – Day 3
By Chris Mack - 16 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

I continue to focus on line-edge roughness in my own research.  This means that I attended papers in every conference in the symposium, since LER is an issue that cuts across all topics in lithography.  (To be truthful, I meant to go to a paper in the new etch conference that talked about LER, but never made it.)  LER is finally, in my opinion, getting the attention it deserves.  I believe,... » read more

AL 2012 – Day 1
By Chris Mack - 14 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

Attendance at this year’s Advanced Lithography Symposium is up 10% this year, to over 1500, though we still haven’t recovered from the huge drop in numbers that accompanied the economic collapse in 2009.  Still, the mood here is good.  When I ask people how they are doing the answer is almost universally the same:  busy.  And busy is what we will all be this week, trying to navigate the... » read more

AL 2012 – Day 4
By Chris Mack - 14 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

As expected, the first EUV session of the last day of the conference filled a large room.  It was time to hear the status of EUV tool development, in particular the EUV sources.  ASML started things off with a rosy recounting of the successes of 2011.  After installing their sixth NXE:3100 preproduction tool, ASML bragged of the 5300 EUV wafers processed at customer sites by these six tools ... » read more

Tennant’s Law
By Chris Mack - 05 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 1

It’s hard to make things small.  It’s even harder to make things small cheaply. I was recently re-reading Tim Brunner’s wonderful paper from 2003, “Why optical lithography will live forever” [1] when I was reminded of Tennant’s Law [2,3].  Don Tennant spent 27 years working in lithography-related fields at Bell Labs, and has been running the Cornell NanoScale Science and Techno... » read more

Laser pulses illuminate downturn and recovery
By Katherine Derbyshire - 25 Mar, 2011 - Comments: 0

[caption id="attachment_7313" align="alignnone" width="728"] Laser pulses per month for Gigaphoton's KrF and ArF lasers[/caption] I thought this image was a nice illustration of exactly what happened in the most recent industry downturn. The graphic shows the number of pulses per laser, per month, for Gigaphoton's installed base of ArF and KrF lasers. A stepper processing 1,000 wafers per mo... » read more

Race Intensifies To Develop EUV Source
By Ed Sperling - 02 Dec, 2010 - Comments: 0

By David Lammers The technology competition to supply the source of EUV radiation for the next-generation lithography tools has long been divided between the laser-produced plasma (LPP) approach, favored by Cymer (San Diego) and Gigaphoton (Oyama, Japan), and the discharge -produced plasma (DPP) method supported by Xtreme Technologies (Aachen, Germany). The competition is heating up, and it... » read more

EUV Focus Shifts To Affordability
By Ed Sperling - 08 Jul, 2010 - Comments: 0

By David Lammers Over the past year, key technologists in the semiconductor industry have come around to believing that EUV lithography will be available for critical mask layers in the next three to five years. What is still up for debate is whether EUV will be cost-effective for low-power consumer SoCs. To penetrate that cost-sensitive market, EUV must overcoming hurdles presented by masks, ... » read more

Pricey Processes For Low Power
By Ed Sperling - 08 Apr, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Pallab Chatterjee Recently Samsung gave an update on the status and availability of its advanced 32/28nm process technology for use in foundry. The process is targeted for shipping designs to customers at the end of this year, with a road map that continues through the 22/20nm nodes and down to 15nm. What was particularly interesting were several key innovations that have made this all p... » read more

Software Becomes The Main Differentiating Factor
By Ed Sperling - 10 Jun, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Software has always been critical in determining what makes one chip different from another, but for the next couple of process nodes it will take on new significance. Rather than just defining function, it also will be one of the key determinants in performance and function. Behind this change is a bottleneck in lithography, which generally is not something most design eng... » read more

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