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There are two technologies used in etching, UV and EUV. UV was designed for nodes upto 40 nm (approx). EUV can be used with accuracy of 13nm. EUV has been under
by rusticpenn 7y ago
There are two technologies used in etching, UV and EUV. UV was designed for nodes upto 40 nm (approx). EUV can be used with accuracy of 13nm. EUV has been under development for more than a decade in several firms, so companies used several trickes to make use of UV for lower sizes. 10nm is the extreme end of it (I guess). For EUV this is standard range. It should work without any issues until 5nm and then special tricks would be used to make the pitch smaller.
So manufacturing 10n, with UV is much harder than manufacturing 7nm with EUV (although it is more expensive).
- Confusion 7y agoYup, back in 2003 I was doing experimental work on creating better EUV mirrors and the amount of reflection achieved was way too low to support any machine with a design similar to UV machines. You needed either a (much) higher intensity source or fewer mirrors. I've been out of that loop for a while, so I don't know how the design of the EUV machines turned out.
- ragebol 7y agoAFAIK, some (less than?) 2% of energy put into the EUV source ends up at the wafer. The EUV-source has been the biggest struggle for ASML from what I gathered in media. Apparently, tiny droplets of tin are created by spinning some disk(s) and then those droplets are zapped with with a laser before they emit EUV. Those machines are crazy complex.
- Dylan16807 7y agoUV is under 1%, and EUV is under .01%
- kingosticks 7y agoBut don't TSMC use UV right now for their process? If so, UV vs EUV can't be the only reason for the mess they've gotten themselves in.