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It's about time: IMEC, Albany Nanotech join forces in EUV litho collaboration |
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Jan 22, 2008 at 08:45 PM |
As reported at Fabtech and elsewhere, the two leading EUV lithography research centers---IMEC in Belgium and the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University of Albany---will collaborate "to accelerate the introduction of EUVL into manufacturing." Scientists from IBM and ASML, whose alpha demo tool (ADT) is in R&D hands, will also participate.
My reaction to the news: It's about time, EUVL needs all the help it can get, and good luck.
Unless development of the platform starts picking up speed, it will accelerate to the cul de sac of semiconductor history where 157-nm, SCALPEL e-beam, and other litho technologies that have gobbled up lots of money, time, and futile effort reside in process oblivion.
If EUVL is ever to become the Moore's Law roadmap extender that its supporters hope it will be---and forget about the press release's pollyannaish verbiage of "building confidence in the technology for the 32 nm node," because that ship has sailed, so we're talking about 22 nm---it has to solve a life raft full of problems: resist exposure problems, insufficient collector optics, insufficient laser light sources, defect-riddled mask blanks (that's getting close, though), not just low-defect reticles but no-defect reticles, absurdly low throughputs and other productivity challenges, and a galling projected price tag in the neighborhood of $100 million per system or more.
This IMEC-Albany Nanotech collaboration may be the last, best hope for EUVL, and it still may not be enough (even if, in a parallel universe, Intel were to join the effort). But as I said, good luck to the team, because you're gonna need it.
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