Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Science and Technology (EUV)

Center Technology Underlies Manufacture of Future Computer Chips

The NSF ERC for Extreme Ultraviolet Science and Technology (ERC EUV), headquartered at Colorado State University, is partnering with the semiconductor industry in the development of Extreme Ultraviolet lithography, a transformational approach to the manufacture of future computer chips, which are likely to enter high-volume manufacturing at the 32 nm node in 2011 with 20 GHz chips. To date, chip lithography has slowly evolved from using visible and ultraviolet discharge sources to using ultraviolet laser sources, now at 193 nm, and soon to include emersion optics. The next step is expected to be a major shift in wavelength down to 13 nm-far from the visible and near-UV infrastructure that has been available for decades.

This substantial move to the extreme UV requires major new developments in EUV sources, resists, masks, optics and optical coatings, vacuum handling techniques, etc. The EUV ERC is playing a major role in the development and testing of EUV resists, mask defect inspection metrologies, and EUV optical coatings; provides the world's leading and most useful EUV calibrations and standards capabilities; and is presently developing compact coherent EUV sources that are critically needed for use in a wide variety of manufacturing on-site metrology tasks for optical characterization and alignment, defect inspection, small field pattering for resist evaluation, etc. With high-volume manufacturing set to start in 2011 and to extend for several generations, probably to 2020 and beyond, the EUV ERC is well positioned to have a significant impact on the $250B semiconductor industry.

To learn more about this topic:
Visit the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Science and Technology web page at http://euverc.colostate.edu/research/research.shtml.

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Sematech-supported Micro-Exposure-Tool (MET)
optics being installed at UC-Berkeley for EUV
photoresist and mask defect printability testing.

Example of pattern printed with 13.5 nm
light in an EUV photoresist.

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Last modified: April 13, 2007