tag: lithography

Advanced Semiconductor Device Lithography – pushing the optical limit for lithography
By Michael Watts - 11 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

Michael P. C. Watts Given that the alternatives all have challenges, it looks to me that optical lithography will have to deliver the 16 nm and most likely the 11 nm node. In my last blog, I reviewed the news from SPIE’s Advanced Lithography conference on all the non-optical solutions. My conclusion was that in the best case, EUV and imprint could just make the 11 nm node but both have out... » read more

Advanced Semiconductor Device Lithography – what is going to happen next ?
By Michael Watts - 07 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

by Michael P. C. Watts The noise and hype level around lithography these days is rather loud. At SPIE’s Advanced Lithography conference this year, a huge crowd heard all the different strategies and opinions. Is there any way to make sense of all the confusion? This is my view ! To start, I think it’s worth remembering what has to be accomplished. The goal is to manufacture sub 22 nm ... » read more

Directed Self Assembly – record breaking small features
By Michael Watts - 27 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Michael P.C. Watts Directed Self Assembly (DSA) was the breakout subject at this year’s SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference. This conference is the biggest annual get together for lithography nerds, and I use it to keep up with the latest academic and industrial trends. Anyone who is anyone seems to be evaluating DSA. On a personal note, as it turns out, I did my PhD in block copolymer... » read more

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

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