MANUFACTURING CHIP MANUFACTURING
Taking microelectronics innovation to the extreme
Cutting-edge lithography machines are a prime example of the critical role photonics-enabled technology plays in a booming industry
T
o make electronic devices faster and more efficient, the microelectronics industry continues to push for
smaller and smaller feature sizes on its chips. Transistors in today’s cell phones are typically 10nm across or less, smaller than a virus cell. Scaling transistors down below these dimensions requires advanced processes for lithography, the primary technique for printing electrical circuit elements on silicon wafers. Advanced lithography systems are at the
forefront of electronics advancement and are a technological wonder. A single machine contains tens of thousands of components, kilometres of cables, and can cost more than $100 million. Optics and photonics components are vital in these machines, and the industry plays a vital role within semiconductor manufacturing. We asked an ASML spokesperson about the firm’s relationship with the sector.
How ASML works with the optics community
How do optical technologies help you to serve your customers’ needs? Our customers are the world’s leading chipmakers. We provide these chipmakers with hardware, software and services to mass produce patterns on silicon through lithography. These organisations seek to create smaller, faster and more powerful chips, and their roadmaps require continued shrink and reduction in edge placement error to drive affordable scaling. Our lithography systems use
ultraviolet light to create billions of tiny structures on thin slices of silicon. These structures make up an integrated circuit, or chip. The more structures that chipmakers can cram on a chip, the faster and more powerful it is. That’s why our systems focus on
making such structures smaller and smaller. With extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, we do that by harnessing light of a much shorter wavelength (13.5nm light) than with deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines (193nm light). With EUV light, our systems can offer higher resolution lithography, which allows our customers to create smaller, faster and more powerful chips. EUV lithography is now being used by the world’s largest logic and memory chipmakers. In parallel with adoption of
those systems, we are developing a next-generation EUV platform with a higher numerical aperture of 0.55 (‘High-NA’ or ‘EUV 0.55 NA’). This platform, called EXE, is an evolutionary step on EUV technology and includes a novel
optics design, which has been developed to provide higher contrast and higher productivity. The optical module of our first EUV 0.55NA system, EXE:5000, is eight times the volume and six times the weight of the optical module in our TwinScan NXE:3400C system (which supports EUV volume production at the 7nm and 5nm nodes; weighs 12 tons and has 44,000 parts; and is polished to extreme accuracy (20 picometer). If you were to blow up these mirrors to the size of planet Earth, the biggest aberration would be the size of a human hair.
How is your R&D set up and how do you work with external organisations? We spent €3.3bn on R&D in 2022, which represents 63% growth
from the 2019 investment level. However, our innovation does not work in isolation; it is part of a close collaboration with our more than 14,000 R&D employees and key partners in the value chain. We see ourselves as architects and integrators, working with partners in an innovation ecosystem. By sharing our expertise with the ecosystem, we build a strong knowledge network capable of creating technological solutions that society can tap into. We share both risk and reward, and this collaborative approach allows us to accelerate innovation. We focus on collaboration
with research centres, fueling the innovation pipeline through partnerships with academia and research institutes, and collaboration with R&D partners g
Photonics Frontiers 2023 39
FRONTIERS PHOTONICS
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