4-minute read - by Christine Middleton, January 25, 2024
After a decade of R&D, ASML shipped the first modules of the first High NA EUV lithography system to Intel in December 2023. The TWINSCAN EXE:5000 represents a significant step forward for cutting-edge chip manufacturing.
Chipmakers rely on shrink – making transistors smaller and packing more of them onto silicon wafers – to drive advances in microchip technology. It’s not the only way to improve chips; novel architectures, for example, can also enhance performance. But there’s a reason why Moore’s Law is essentially the law of the land: Shrink has been behind an exponential growth in computing power for more than 50 years.
For years we’ve been pushing deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography to its limits. To reduce the size of the smallest feature that can be printed, known as the critical dimension (CD), there are two main knobs we can turn: the wavelength of light, λ, and the numerical aperture, NA. Now, however, there’s little room left to adjust those knobs in our DUV systems.
EUV lithography allowed us to make a big turn of the wavelength knob: It uses 13.5 nm light, compared to 193 nm for the highest-resolution DUV systems. When our first pre-production EUV lithography platform, the NXE, first shipped in 2010, it delivered a drop in CD from more than 30 nm in DUV down to 13 nm with EUV.
