FEATURE LITHOGRAPHY
Subsidising a way out of semicon shortages
Proposed multi- billion dollar and euro packages look set to increase uptake of leading- edge lithography, including for photonic technologies, finds Andy Extance
S
ince 2020, anyone wanting to buy a car, or a computer, has had to wait longer for their orders, which is inconvenient for consumers,
but more importantly means lost sales for manufacturers. The impact has spread across to include networking equipment and medical devices, and even chip making systems themselves, slowing efforts to recover from the shortages. Apple even forecasts that problems will continue to 2023. That’s enough of a crisis to have firmly grabbed political attention in Europe and the US.
The pandemic accelerated the digital
transition, according to Werner Steinhögl, head of sector for the microelectronics and photonics industry within the European Union Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG Connect). That means many more people need computers, Steinhögl told a webinar run by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics on 21 April. ‘In the EU, there was really a supply problem,’ he said. Steinhögl explained that building
a new semiconductor fab can cost more than €10bn. Yet even if the EU provided funding to build those fabs, there is no longer sufficient expertise to manufacture chips at modern lithographic
16 Electro Optics May 2022
nodes smaller than 20nm, he added. That’s significant, because lithography
is the key processing step in chip making, explained Osama Awadelkarim, director of the Center for Nanotechnology Education and Utilization (CNEU) at Pennsylvania State University in the US. ‘It determines achievable device miniaturisation, and the chip making cost, since lithography constitutes most of the total cost of integrated circuit manufacturing,’ Awadelkarim said. He also noted that higher labour costs make any fabs in the US and Europe more expensive to run than those in Asia. That would normally prevent investment,
but the current chip shortages are not normal. ‘The support of the government is necessary to incentivise the chip making industry to build new fabs,’ Awadelkarim explained. ‘The other option for not building new fabs is to become dependent on chip supply from Asia. This is a very high- risk undertaking.’ Consequently, the EU and US are putting funding and support structures in place to expand local semiconductor industries. In February 2022, the European Commission announced the European Chips Act. It seeks to ‘mobilise more than €43bn of public and private investments’ to ‘ensure the EU’s security of supply, resilience and technological leadership in semiconductor technologies and applications’. It wants to increase the region’s semiconductor manufacturing market share to 20 per cent by 2030, up from around 8 per cent at present. In the same month in the US, which has a similar share of the semiconductor market to Europe, the House of Representatives passed similar Chips for America Act investments. These totalled $52bn to strengthen domestic semiconductor manufacturing and research. Also, in the US in June 2021, senators introduced the Fabs Act to offer a 25 per cent tax credit on investments to build or improve
Building a new semiconductor fab can cost more than €10bn
semiconductor fabrication plants, or fabs. Lithography will be a central consideration in these acts, while photonic technologies in general may benefit.
Funding and skills It inevitably takes time between announcing such acts and their full enactment, if they are even enacted. The Chips for America Act first appeared in the House of Representatives in June 2020. When the Senate passed it in June 2021, the Act included $39bn in grants for fab construction over five years, with officials suggesting that seven to 10 facilities might be built. The Chips for America Act also included $11.2bn for research and development, including a National Semiconductor Technology Centre, a National Packaging Centre and a national network for microelectronics research. While the February House approval seems to clear a path for the Chips for America Act to become reality, the Fabs Act has stalled in the Senate Finance Committee. Beyond this, the Chips for America
Act does not elaborate on the support for different areas of chip making and semiconductor processing, Awadelkarim
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