Emir Gurer, Tom Zhong, John Lewellen, Murthy Krishna & Eddie Lee,
Silicon Valley Group, Track Systems, San Jose, CA, USA

The demand for smaller and faster semiconductor devices to accommodate high density information transfer has dramatically accelerated the development of photolithography, the key device shrinkage enabling technology, and the shift from one generation to the next. Due to the shortened lifetime of each generation of semiconductor devices and the large amount of capital investment required to develop each generation of semiconductor equipment, there is an enormous economic incentive for the semiconductor industry to extend the current 248nm lithography technology towards 0.13µm geometries and below.