Cost Effective Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography to at least 11 nanometers

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). This would enable the ITRS roadmap to stay on track through 2022.

The ASML EUV roadmap is different from the International technology roadmap for semiconductors which is linked to here and which has the table below:

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.