ASML Holding NV (ASML)
presents today at the 2008 International Symposium on Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography
(EUV) on recent achievements in its EUV lithography program and unveils a production
system roadmap that supports cost-effective chip manufacturing to at least 11
nanometers (nm).
The NXE series of lithography machines will be built on an evolved TWINSCAN™
platform. Design of the first production system is complete, the supply chain
is fully engaged and system manufacturing has started. ASML currently has orders
for five of these systems from Memory and Logic customers on three continents.
“EUV lithography remains the most attractive option for extending Moore’s
Law,” stated Martin van den Brink, ASML’s executive vice president
of marketing and technology. “As a single-exposure, multi-node technology,
EUV offers the greatest extendibility at the lowest cost of ownership.”
NXE production systems are the result of the learning and infrastructure development
made possible by ASML EUV Alpha Demo Tools (ADT). In August 2006 ASML shipped
the industry’s first full-field EUV exposure tools. One EUV ADT was installed
at IMEC in Leuven, Belgium and another at CNSE in Albany, New York, USA.
EUV Technology Milestones
Both IMEC and Albany have EUV development programs being executed on ADT systems
with continuously improving performance results.
- The first functional devices made using EUV lithography on full-field chips
were published in February 2008.
- The contact layer of a functional 32-nm SRAM cell printed using EUV lithography
was demonstrated in July 2008.
- Progress with photoresist development has yielded 28-nm half pitch images
using single exposure, conventional illumination, and no OPC (Optical Proximity
Correction). OPC is a photolithography enhancement technique that modifies
the chip design pattern on the mask to compensate for image errors due to
diffraction.
- System overlay has been improved to 5 nm, the same distance a human hair
grows in 1 second.
- Throughput has seen a ten-fold increase since the ADT systems were first
installed.
- The first prototype LPP (Laser Produced Plasma) system is operational and
100W burst power was achieved on schedule. LPP is one method of generating
EUV photons for imaging and will be used in the first NXE production systems.
Discharge-produced-plasma (DPP) is another method which is currently used
in the ASML EUV ADT.
- In addition to critical development work on ADT that enables EUVL for production,
critical technology milestones have been reached on hardware for the volume
production platform.