May 21, 2012 — Stefan Wurm, director of lithography, SEMATECH will present “EUV Lithography Manufacturing Introduction: Infrastructure Readiness” in the session Technology Trends in Semiconductor Manufacturing at The ConFab 2012, June 3-6 in Las Vegas.
Wurm will be joined by An Steegan, IMEC; Thomas Jefferson, G450 Consortium; and Naoya Hayashi, Dai Nippon Printing Co. Ltd.
Extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) has been in development for about a quarter century and is now getting ready for prime time with the first production tools expected to ship by year end 2012 and high volume manufacturing (HVM) ramp-up expected to start in 2014. The EUVL infrastructure to support the ongoing pilot line introduction is largely in place but productivity and cost remain a challenge for the HVM ramp-up. There is still a significant EUV source performance gap that must be closed. Resist materials to support the 22nm half-pitch (hp) requirements are available with acceptable sensitivity and with some help from post processing also can meet the line width roughness requirements for memory products; contact hole resist performance still needs to improve.
For EUV masks, the main technical challenges remain the availability of defect free masks and of critical mask tools such as for defect review and inspection. EUV blank defects have been reduced to a level that can support memory products but further improvements are needed to meet logic defect requirements. Ramping up mask blank volume at yield to support the expected mask demand in 2014/15 is a challenge the industry must address for EUVL HVM introduction to be successful.
Dr. Stefan Wurm is director of lithography at SEMATECH, where he works as a GLOBALFOUNDRIES assignee. He has more than 20 years of industry and R&D experience and has held technical and management positions in research and development at AMD, Siemens Semiconductor Group, Infineon, Qimonda, and SEMATECH. He was first assigned to SEMATECH in the late 1990s to the International 300 mm Initiative (I300I), where he was responsible for 300 mm metrology tool equipment demonstrations.
Prior to his previous assignment as associate director of lithography at SEMATECH, he served four years as SEMATECH’s extreme ultraviolet (EUV) program manager, where he has been instrumental in shaping and directing the SEMATECH EUV program which provides worldwide EUV infrastructure capabilities and technology learning to SEMATECH members. Dr. Wurm holds a doctorate in natural sciences from the Technische Universität München, Germany.