|
The MET5 microlithography tool at the Advanced Light Source’s beamline 12.0.1 will be housed in an enclosure inside a new clean room with wafer-processing facilities immediately adjacent, built by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The MET5 tool, funded by industry, incorporates a state-of-the-art, 8-nm optic. Image: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
|
As manufacturers pack more and more circuitry into
the tiny microchips on which electronic technologies depend, ultraviolet
light’s narrow wavelengths are essential for creating the densely patterned
chips of the future. Leading semiconductor and emerging-technology firms have
recently renewed their long collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy's
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to build facilities and
instruments for advanced extreme-ultraviolet lithography (EUVL), including microlithography
test tools too costly for individual manufacturers.
Since the early 2000s, Berkeley Lab's Center for X‑Ray
Optics (CXRO) has worked with semiconductor companies to develop the
infrastructure needed for world-leading research and development in the field
of EUVL, contributing basic research and development essential to the health of
the U.S.
industry as a whole before individual firms enter competition.
In total funding valued at almost $10 million,
Berkeley Lab has recently reinvested $1.5 million in royalties from other
licensed technologies to build a new clean room and wafer-processing facility
at Beamline 12 of the Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS), where CXRO researchers
will create the MET5 microfield exposure tool. To build the tool, industry will
provide several million dollars plus valuable optics, with additional support
to operate the new facility.
Horst Simon, Berkeley Lab's deputy director,
demonstrated Berkeley Lab's commitment to maintaining the currency of the
Advanced Light Source's services to its valued users by arranging for
investment of Lab funds in the new facilities. "This is an excellent example of
how the Department of Energy is engaging in innovative collaborations with
industry, and how our national labs contribute to maintaining, and indeed
increasing, U.S. leadership in a field that has been largely created in this
country. We must maintain this type of continued technology investment in order
to remain competitive as a nation in today's global economy."
Says Roger Falcone, director of the Advanced Light
Source, "The Lab's investment encouraged industry to continue our fruitful
research partnership, assuring them that their investment here will be
leveraged to enable the leading-edge research needed in the coming decades."
"The MET5 will be a unique instrument with double
the effective resolution of the best tools now in commercial use," says CXRO’s
director, Patrick Naulleau, a staff scientist in the Lab's Materials Sciences
Division. "MET5 and the new wafer-processing facility at ALS Beamline 12 will
allow us to develop and test photosensitive materials capable of transferring
patterns on the nanoscale, the future domain of semiconductor lithography technology."
Extreme ultraviolet lithography embraces a range of
technologies, including special mirrors and photomasks that reflect soft-X-ray
light, to image circuit patterns onto the surface of semiconductor wafers.
Since the wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light is much shorter than visible
light, EUVL can produce chips whose circuitry has much smaller features,
enabling orders-of-magnitude more memory capacity and operating speed than
today's best electronic devices.
The MET5 microlithography tool uses the extraordinarily
bright beams of EUV light produced by the Advanced Light Source to project
circuit features, measured in billionths of a meter, onto semiconductor wafers.
The exposed patterns on the wafers are a few nanometers in dimension, and will
be instantly processed under clean room conditions for evaluating the results.
In future commercial facilities, larger designs will be stacked one on another
at high speeds to produce working circuitry; the test facility is a necessary
first step to try out new approaches.
"To insure that tomorrow's technology will be
successful," Naulleau says, "we have to develop every aspect of the process in
advance."
SOURCE
