The Chip Insider®–SPIE ALP- Are there no more wavelengths?

Summary: SPIE Advanced Lithography & Patterning Conference: After 50 years of breakthroughs … a dark question emerged: Was EUV the last wavelength? This is a very critical question, because if true, it would affect every corner of the industry because it would effectively mean the end of Moore’s Law. It’s hidden right there in Gordon Moore’s 1965 Electronics Magazine article… Over the last 50 years, the progress of scaling … and thus the industry … has been critically dependent on these two factors, which have to a large degree been moved forward by this very conference... Why would EUV be the last wavelength? There are two reasons: Economic and Technical... Cost of B-EUV tool development … Don’t laugh … You just need a different frame of mind to understand this. B-EUV Technology Barriers: There are significant challenges with wavelengths shorter than EUV’s 13.5 nm... This 50th Anniversary ALP conference proved that technologists rarely look back. Sometimes they look sideways. But most of the time they are laser focused on what’s ahead. The 50th Anniversary ALP conference proved to be a springboard for what’s ahead. Before it, I would say B-EUV was seen almost as a joke. I was certainly a sceptic. Now I’m not so sure. As I wrote in December, ‘Moore’s Law is dead. Long live Moore’s Law.’

IBM to the rescue: Morris Chang once chided the top R&D executives at TSMC: “If IBM can do it, you know it can be done.” Alan Gabor’s Lithography Roadmap went all the way to 1A and 2040, showing the technologies needed to pave the way. This included… Vivek Bakshi’s presentation on the Blue-X consortium and its TWG … (Technical Working Group) was another eye-opener about how the lithography community is coming together to push scaling ahead… Then there was Lace Lithography’s time machine that catapulted you from Hank Smith’s MIT Lincoln Labs in the 90s to today (13982-76). Lace is out of Norway. The presenter, Bodil Holst is CEO and co-founder. She proposed using matter waves … helium atoms … The advantage is … The disadvantage is there’s so much missing infrastructure. This was true of all the B-EUV work presented. It reminded me of the old NGL days filled with many dreams of which only one, EUV, would win and the winner, ASML, wasn’t even there. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the EUV party, which is a long-forgotten truth. They never stole it as some have claimed. No one else wanted it after the few that did died in the funding desert… Lithography is a system of tools, processes, materials, and flows that, when ignored, leave their protagonists without food or water in a death valley.

“I've always been more interested in the future than in the past”
— Grace Hopper