By Vivek Bakshi, EUV Litho, Inc.
There is lot to keep up with about EUVL, whether it’s details about its insertion in HVM, or readiness for next-generation EUVL to continue extending Moore’s Law. Following are the key topics to look for and what you can expect to hear about them in the upcoming EUVL Workshop, June 11-14, Berkeley, CA.
Latest on EUVL readiness
At this point, the industry’s focus is on availability data for the scanner, as EUVL is being inserted into HVM. You can expect to get the latest data on scanner uptime from Britt Turkot of Intel in her keynote talk. Harry Levinson in GlobalFoundries in his keynote will give a pragmatic view of status and challenges on EUVL, while Anthony Yen of ASML will provide the latest status of EUVL technology from ASML’s perspective.
Brand-new proposal for EUV Resist Technology – touted as a potential game changer by the inventor
I am also very excited about the keynote from Prof. Tagawa-san. Four years ago, he proposed the PASCAR approach to get more patterning per EUV photons, via increasing EUV resist’s sensitivity using his unique proposal. This process is now in development by TEL and IMEC. Now he has come up with another new idea to help EUVL address stochastics. He describes his newest proposal as a “very new idea of the solution of both very high resist sensitization and overcoming stochastics problems of EUV lithography patterning, such as micro-bridges or line-breaks of lines and spaces (missing or kissing contact holes). This new idea comes from the very different viewpoints of the current lithographic way of dealing with stochastics problems. It changes EUV lithography dramatically like [a] game changer. This topic is very interesting for industries.”
Lot more new things about EUVL
AMAT has now entered the EUV mask blank business. They will have two presentations: one about their new mask blank deposition technology, and another on substrates. AMAT is a heavyweight and their entrance into EUV mask blank is expected to be a positive news for EUVL mask blank technology. I look forward to finding about the progress of their program. Veeco, the maker of the current mask blank deposition tool, also will be there to talk about the current status of technology and their plans to further improve their tool.
We will hear from leading physicists from LANL on their ideas for increasing conversion efficiency (CE) of Sn LPP source. With their high-power computation facility, codes and plasma physics knowledge that no one can easily match, I look forward to their insights for our industry. By increasing CE, we can get more EUV photons for the same input power – I see increased CE as a must for EUVL sources.
EUV resist has needed an objective assessment of progress and a roadmap that tracks progress about various new approaches. The ITRS roadmap went away several years ago, and this year we will have a new roadmap from ARNCL for EUV resists.
In other notable papers, we will hear the latest on multi-beam e-beam writers from the leader in this area, progress on HHG sources that are enabling stopgap patterned mask inspection. We also will hear updates from Zeiss on EUV optics; from Gigaphoton on high power EUV sources to support scanners; from JSR on EUV resists; and a new model for metal oxide EUV resists; and lot more. Also, Prof. Rocca will deliver a keynote talk on his EUV light sources that can enable next generation inspection technologies. You can review the entire agenda at www.euvlitho.com.
Finally, there is a new textbook on EUVL this year from SPIE Press, with lots of new data on this exciting new technology from leaders in the industry. This year in the EUVL short course held on Monday at the workshop, we will cover material from this book as well as talk about new opportunities in EUVL. I’ll write more about that in my next blog.
I look forward to seeing you at the workshop and helping you find out the latest about EUVL.
