Photo Credit: R&DThe world’s most advanced extreme-ultraviolet microscope is about to go online at the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and the queue of semiconductor companies waiting to use it already stretches out the door.

The much-anticipated SHARP microscope (SEMATECH High-NA Actinic Recticle review Project) was conceived and built by scientists at Berkeley Lab’s Center for X-ray Optics (CXRO) and will provide semiconductor companies with the means to push their chip-making technology to new levels of miniaturization and complexity. The instrument is housed at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at Berkeley Lab.

SHARP replaces an older tool, also located at the ALS, and has been many years in the making. Kenneth Goldberg, a researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Div., and deputy directory of CXRO, runs the project.

“With the old tool we suffered greatly just to squeeze good results from it,” says Goldberg. “We always talked about what we’d do if we had the chance to do it right.”

Goldberg and his colleagues got that chance thanks to a partnership with SEMATECH, a consortium of semiconductor companies and chip-makers who recognized in CXRO the ideal combination of resources and expertise. Those companies are interested in developing EUV fabrication techniques in order to shrink circuit elements in their computer chips down to a few nanometers in size—five to ten times smaller than they are today.

In semiconductor fabrication, circuits of silicon are made via photolithography.    READ MORE