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IBM and New York State invest $10bn in high-NA EUV lithography centre


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ew York State has partnered with IBM, Micron, and other industry players to invest $10bn into a new high-numerical-aperture (NA)


extreme ultraviolet (EUV) centre. The facility will offer 50,000 square feet


of new clean-room space, which has the potential to create a large number of jobs in the region, while creating a future for semiconductor research and production in the US. For the past decade, the gold standard


system for manufacturing chips has been EUV lithography machines built by Dutch firm ASML. These have allowed IBM and others to shrink the size of transistors to just a few nanometres: IBM has shown a path for building chips from 7nm down to 2nm nanosheet technology. The 2nm nanosheet technology allows for 50 billion transistors on a single chip. But being able to print chip circuits at


these minuscule sizes requires a resolution of laser so precise that even the current crop of machines would struggle to do so in a way that’s conducive to mass production. The High NA EUV Center at the Albany


NanoTech Complex – a semiconductor research facility where IBM is one member of a consortium – will be North America’s first and only publicly owned research and


development centre with a high-NA EUV system. The machine from ASML can perform a new technique that could pave the way to developing and producing chips at nodes even smaller than 2nm. Laser-based lithography has been key to designing and producing chips at scale for decades. Existing EUV machines, though they have supported the last decade of semiconductor process development, can’t hit the resolution needed for sub-2nm nodes to be patterned into chips in a way that would be conducive to mass production. The machines can get that precise – which is how IBM developed the first working 2nm node – but it takes three or four exposures


from the EUV light to do it, rather than a single exposure. This, along with other issues associated with shrinking feature sizes, meant that researchers needed to consider a new method – namely high-NA EUV lithography. This new method is functionally the same


physical process as EUV lithography, but as the name suggests, the optics are larger and support higher-resolution patterns to be printed on the wafer. If you’ve ever used a professional camera, you’ll know that increasing the numerical aperture results in a sharper focus, but that also means a shallower depth of focus. The same is true with high NA EUV lithography.


ASML and Samsung strike €700m deal to build research plant D


utch chip-making equipment giant ASML has agreed a deal with Samsung Electronics to invest around €700m ($755m) in the


development of a semiconductor research plant in Seoul, South Korea. The deal will help to cement a


‘semiconductor alliance’ between South Korea and the Netherlands. South Korean President, Yoon Suk-yeol, said: “The technological innovation led by ASML is becoming a powerful driving force


4 Electro Optics February 2024


of the Fourth Industrial Revolution around the world, and Dutch semiconductor companies such as ASML and ASM are building new facilities for production, R&D, and talent training in Korea.” According to Nikkei Asia, the deal was


ratified with the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) at ASML’s headquarters in the Netherlands, as the companies agreed to invest “jointly in the future” through a facility that would


“develop cutting-edge semiconductor processing technology using next- generation equipment”. The agreement between ASML and Samsung has been struck against a global technology backdrop where chipmakers are competing to develop advanced semiconductors using ASML’s EUV lithography equipment. Samsung, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Intel are all competing to produce the next ‘2nm’ generation of chips.


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