Light sources for next generation lithography
A breakthrough discovery may help aid the semiconductor industry’s quest to squeeze more information on chips to accelerate the performance of electronic devices.
So far, the semiconductor industry has been successful in its consistent efforts to reduce feature size on a chip.
In an effort to help create faster, better and cheaper light sources for chips, UC San Diego researchers are developing laser-produced light sources for next generation Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUVL).
Mark Tillack and his team found that employing a long pulse in a CO{-2} laser system used in an EUVL source could make the system significantly more efficient, simpler, and cheaper compared to that using a shorter pulse.
Their research findings were recently published in Applied Physics Letters. “CO{-2} lasers, which we use in our lab, have two advantages — they are inherently cheaper to build and operate, and they give better conversion efficiency from the laser to EUV light,” he said.
Less expensive
“Our discovery that long pulses work well enough means that the CO{-2} laser system can be built and operated more cheaply.”
Tillack pointed to possible future applications for EUVL, such as flash memory chips, which will become denser and denser. “Imagine in the future being able to make a 200 gigabyte flash disk memory stick cheaply,” he said. — Our Bureau
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