EUV Chipmaking Inches Forward

szotz writes "You've got falling droplets of molten tin, bright lasers, and fancy evacuated optics. What's not to love about EUV light sources? The fact that we still don't have them in production lines producing chips. Light source maker ASML says it's 'more confident' that the technology's on track now, and that the machines should meet their target brightness by 2015, in time to help pattern the 10nm generation of chips — the next next generation. We'll see. Or then again maybe we won't. The light's outside the visible range."

Comments

EUV source

[Anonymous Coward]

I was at SPIE in San Jose in 2011 and they had a few of the demo EUV light sources on the convention floor. It looked like it was out of the Hellraiser films. I can only imagine how large (and evil looking) something capable of doing 125 300mm wafers per hour will be.

All joking aside, there are still huge obstacles to overcome for EUV. The line edge roughness issue may be a show stopper for nodes beyond 10nm as the chemistry of the diffusion lengths of the photo-activated compounds of the resist is close to this feature size and can add a significant variance to the CD of the lines. Also cost is going to be a major question, last I heard the "pre-production" tools are going for 130 million a piece and the reticle sets are going to be getting into millions of dollars (if not 10 Million). So if its cheaper to buy a bunch of E-beam tools and/or a bunch of 193nm immersion tools (for triple patterning) the EUV may never make economic sense for fabs.

Re:EUV source

[hankwang]

"a bunch of 193nm immersion tools (for triple patterning) the EUV may never make economic sense for fabs."

A problem with dual/triple patterning is that it is mostly suitable for making parallel lines, not complex patterns. It happens that this works very well for NAND memory, but for CPUs, not so much.

Another problem is that you need 2x or 3x the number of process steps, which puts the higher price for EUV machines into perspective.

I expect that the primary target at the moment is to develop the technology. Once we're there, more attention can go to reducing costs.

Disclosure: I work at ASML on the EUV source. But this are my own views; I don't officially represent the company.

Progress

[Mandrel]

A 10nm feature size is 1000 times smaller than the first 10um processes of the early 1970s. That is, one million transistors will soon fit into the space that one used to.

Here's a more informative link

[pongo000]

Actually explains the process in detail:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/plans-for-nextgen-chips-imperiled

BTW, it's considered good practice in anything related to scientific research to define acronyms the first time they are used. In this case, EUV == extreme ultraviolet

Re:ASML

[hankwang]

ASML aren't a "light source maker", they don't "make" anything actually.

With the acquisition of Cymer, ASML is actually a light source maker.

integrate stuff from different suppliers, and have contractors bolt it together.

It is true that ASML outsources the manufacturing of most components as far as it involves materials processing (machining, coating, soldering) and off-the-shelf components (pumps, filters, sensors, computers, bolts, cables, etc.). But the actual assembly and tuning of these thousands of components is done by ASML's own employees in ASML's own cleanrooms. As I am typing this, this is happening about 15 meters below my office.

Given the wide variety in technologies used in these scanners, and given how fast the technology changes, it wouldn't make much sense to do all the materials processing in-house. For me as a design engineer it is quite cool that I generally only need to worry whether the design of a component is manufacturable by some supplier in the world, rather than that I have to keep in mind what our own tools, which have to be used because they are not yet written off. That would slow down development tremendously -- it is already hard enough to keep up with Moore's law without such a restriction.

(The above are my own views/opinions yadda yadda)