By Vivek Bakshi, EUV Litho, Inc.

As we look forward to 2017 SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference in San Jose next week, the focus once again will be on EUV Lithography, its readiness for manufacturing and plans of chip makers for starting to use EUVL in their fabs.

Insertion is planned from 7 to 5nm nodes by chip makers in coming years. The areas of focus at 7nm are mostly related to productivity and uptime goals of sources in addition to pellicle. The 5nm insertion has few other areas come into focus where more work is needed like actinic inspection, resist readiness and mask blank defectivity – although none of them is a showstopper.

List of challenges pick up lot more at 3nm node, as we consider high NA scanner, corresponding newer design for EUV masks and need to for upto 500 W of source power. A detailed list of these challenges is worth a review and is now published at the website www.euvlitho.com as topics for 2017 EUVL Workshop in June 2017. I will be updating this list after as well as sharing my opinion on the latest with EUVL in coming weeks after this year’s SPIE AL meeting.