Description:

EUV lithography is the future chip-printing technology that the Semiconductor Industry Association began backing in 2001 as the likely successor, around the year 2007, to the reigning family of refractive optical lithography techniques. The EUV promise is that with wavelengths 50 times smaller than those of visible light, it will be able to draw circuit patterns just tens of nanometers wide. In comparison, the current industry state-of-the-art chips have patterns with 130-nm lines.

Designed to image features of 100 nm and below in patterns with a dense 1:1 ratio of line widths and line spacing, the ETS Set-2 optic easily lived up to its specs, achieving line widths as narrow as 70 nm in elbow patterns. By adjusting the illumination pattern and the exposure dose, the team printed less densely spaced lines with widths down to 39 nm (shown above). These results indicate that with the new optic set expected to arrive at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence-Berkeley National Labs for testing in November 2002, it should be possible to print features in the 16-nm to 18-nm range and thus meet the production requirements set for chips with 1 billion transistors and up in the years 2007 to 2010.
 

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