10GHz Processors and Ultraviolet Lithography

hoyosa writes "This article on zd-net reports that Extreme Ultraviolet LLC has built the first ultraviolet lithography stand for manufacturing processors. Will this make silicone obsolete? " Some interesting bits in there. Also "Soon" means we won't see actual chips until oh, say 2005, so don't hold your breath or anything.

Comments

Silicone, silicon

[KFury]

UV lithography has nothing to do with silicon (or silicone, for that matter...)

It just means using light with a shorter wavelength to etch the silicon wafer, allowing you to use a smaller micron process than you could with longer wavelengths.

You'd still use silicon for the wafer. To say otherwise is like saying that deisel fuel makes cars obsolete. They're entirely different problems.

Coherent EUV sources.

[Christopher Thomas]

There are two big unsolved problems with "extreme ultraviolet" lithography, which is really X-ray lithography. First, you need a coherent X-ray source. The proposed options are a synchrotron, which is big (house-sized) and expensive, or an X-ray laser, which nobody has yet made work. Sandia has claimed a laser-pumped "plasma" source, but it doesn't yet have enough power to do the job.

Or, you can use a frequency-doubled UV laser (frequency-doubled Ar:F lasers are the current favourite, if memory serves).

Shining a laser beam through certain types of material produces an output beam that contains frequencies that are harmonics of the input beam's frequency, due to nonlinear interactions between the incident beam and the electrons in the material.

This has been used as a tool in the lab for years, and has been under intense investigation for lithography for quite a while now. My understanding is that frequency-doubled EUV sources are already shipping.