6-minute read - by Brittney Wolff Zatezalo, October 22, 2021
Commercializing extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography was a decades-long challenge that required relentless collaboration, innovation and persistence. One of the primary requirements was to reach adequate power levels in the EUV light source. The team in San Diego, represented by a trio of research and development engineers – Danny Brown, Alex Schafgans and Yezheng Tao – remained singularly focused on this goal. On September 24, 2021, the team received the Berthold Leibinger Innovation Prize (Innovationspreis).
A prestigious honor granted every two years, the Berthold Leibinger Innovation Prize is an international award that recognizes excellence in research and development work on the application or generation of laser light. The award was granted to the trio who personally made key contributions enabling the herculean jump from 193 nm to 13.5 nm wavelength of light, but also increasing the power of an EUV system to achieve system throughput 2,500 times faster than the first EUV prototype.
Previous winners include Nobel laureate Stefan Hell, who received third prize in 2002, and Cymer founder Rick Sandstrom and Cymer CTO Bill Partlo, who received second prize in 2008. And this year, Danny, Alex and Tao accepted first prize for their breakthrough in the laser-produced plasma source for the EUV lithography scanner enabling high-volume manufacturing. They also recognized the thousands of people who collaborated with them to get this new technology across the finish line.
