tag: EUV

Reaching For The Reset Button In Lithography
By Mark LaPedus - 21 Mar, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus Amid ongoing delays and setbacks, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography and multi-beam e-beam have both missed the 10nm logic node. So for the present, chipmakers must take the brute force route at 10nm by using 193nm immersion with multiple patterning. Now, it’s time to hit the reset button. For the 7nm node, chipmakers currently are lining up the lithographic competition... » read more

Making An Impression with Nanoimprint
By Mark LaPedus - 21 Mar, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down to discuss the trends in lithography with Mark Melliar-Smith, president and chief executive of Molecular Imprints Inc. (MII), a supplier of nanoimprint lithography tools. SMD: How do you view the IC industry now? Melliar-Smith: It’s truly incredible work that this industry continues to do. The industry will see its way f... » read more

Directed Self-Assembly Grows Up
By Mark LaPedus - 21 Mar, 2013 - Comments: 1

By Mark LaPedus At last year’s SPIE Advanced Lithography conference, Christopher Bencher, a member of the technical staff at Applied Materials, said the buzz surrounding directed self-assembly (DSA) technology resembled the fervor generated at the famous Woodstock rock concert in 1969. This was clearly evident from the tumultuous and free-flowing movement that threatened the status quo o... » read more

Breakthroughs Required
By Ed Sperling - 21 Mar, 2013 - Comments: 0

Linear progressions have a hypnotic effect on even the smartest people. They lull everyone into thinking that progress—or at least a progression—is a straight line, with little or no recognition that things are changing around the edges. The periphery is definitely changing, though. And over the next couple of process nodes, the semiconductor manufacturing industry either will have to fi... » read more

Cymer’s EUV Team Has An Exciting Few Months
By Michael Watts - 14 Mar, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Michael P.C. Watts At SPIE Advanced Lithography, Cymer announced some serious progress in EUV source development, one of several highlights. The latest results provided 40W of power in runs over 8 hours that mimicked full productions conditions including dose control. As far as I can tell, 40w translates to around 30 - 300 mm wafers an hour. The Cymer source uses a CO2 laser with 3 ampli... » read more

Extreme sources, block copolymers, and resist polishing at SPIE Advanced Lithography.
By Michael Watts - 04 Mar, 2013 - Comments: 0

by Michael P.C. Watts Lots to talk about from SPIE Advance Lithography Conference this year; EUV power, multi-beam systems, double patterning, and imprint. I thought I would pick up some highlights here, and then come back and talk about them in detail over the next few weeks. One of the extreme sources was the paper from Cymer/ASML on EUV sources . Their paper showed performance, at prod... » read more

Bit Mapping
By Ed Sperling - 22 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

The rule of thumb for semiconductor manufacturing is that big breakthroughs tend to last a decade, or about five process nodes. While the transistor already has spanned more than five decades and the IC more than four decades, the technology used to create them typically only lasts about one. 193nm lithography has been around more than a decade. Bets were being made publicly back at 45nm—o... » read more

Getting Ready For High-Mobility FinFETs
By Mark LaPedus - 21 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus The IC industry entered the finFET era in 2011, when Intel leapfrogged the competition and rolled out the newfangled transistor technology at the 22nm node. Intel hopes to ramp up its second-generation finFET devices at 14nm by year’s end, with plans to debut its 11nm technology by 2015. Hoping to close the gap with Intel, silicon foundries are accelerating their efforts t... » read more

Optical Lithography, Take Two
By Mark LaPedus - 21 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus It’s the worst-kept secret in the industry. Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography has missed the initial stages of the 10nm logic and 1xnm NAND flash nodes. Chipmakers hope to insert EUV by the latter stages of 10nm or by 7nm, but vendors are not counting on EUV in the near term and are preparing their back-up plans. Barring a breakthrough with EUV or other technology, IC ... » read more

Accelerating Moore’s Law
By Ed Sperling - 21 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Ever since the inception of Moore’s Law, process nodes have moved forward at a rate of once every 18 to 24 months. Companies have been talking about slowing down the rate of progression as things get harder, but at least for the next couple of process nodes something very strange will occur—Moore’s Law will accelerate. The root cause is growing competition for a shrinki... » read more

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