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News Article

EUVL Moves Towards High-Volume Manufacturing

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At the 2012 International Symposium on Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography, experts stressed the development of a source suited for high-volume manufacturing as the most critical issue.

Other challenges are the development of yielding masks and the further development of high-quality EUV resists.

This year's EUVL Symposium in Brussels was hosted by imec along with SEMATECH and EIDEC.

The 4-day symposium was attended by 338 industry and research experts. They discussed the advances and challenges in the key critical issues that still have to be solved before EUVL technology can be used in high-volume IC manufacturing.

There was a consensus among the experts that the productivity of the EUV source will have to increase dramatically over the next one to two years for this to be achieved.

By 2014, a reliable 200W source is needed to support the first cost-effective production. After that, the source power will have to increase to 500 to 1000 W to allow for long-term cost-effective manufacturing continuing IC scaling according to Moore's law.

An encouraging development in the past 12 months is that the reliability of the available sources has improved, which is speeding up learning and development in the pilot lines today.

Another plus point is that researchers have demonstrated ways to increase the conversion efficiency to the 4 to 5 percent range, which is significantly higher than what has been achieved to date.

There has also been a clear progress in EUV mask handling.

Nevertheless, the availability of yielding masks to support the pilot lines and the start of high-volume production remains a serious concern. As a result, EUV pellicle solutions are being explored again, to help mitigate the defect challenge.

Speakers at the symposium also reported on incremental improvements in resists that meet the requirements of resolution, line width roughness, and sensitivity simultaneously.

One issue is that the best-performing resist materials often show a lower photo speed that does not align with the sensitivity assumed in the productivity roadmap of the exposure tool suppliers.

The symposium, in conclusion, said that there has been a steady progress in all areas.

But the industry still has to resolve a number of significant challenges before EUV lithography can be introduced in high-volume manufacturing.



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