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Vinodh 09B21A0422

Lithography is basically a photographic process that allows more and more features to be crammed onto a computer chip.
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The current process used to pack more and more transistors onto a chip is called deep-ultraviolet lithography

Boosting EUV Lithography Microchip production: technology of the future comes ever closer How EUVL chip making works Making Chips Moore's Law The EUVL Process Applying Uniform Thin Films The Mask-Making Challenge Outlook for EUV Lithography: Past, Present, and Future Conclusion

Use of transistors

Boosting EUV Lithography

How EUVL chip making works

Silicon has been the heart of the world's technology boom for nearly half a century

The current process used to pack more and more transistors onto a chip is called deepultraviolet lithography

Using this lithography we can increase the memory chip storage also

Making Chips

1. 2. 3. 4.

Mask Photo resist Silicon dioxide Silicon wafer

Process

6. Moores Law

1965: Gordon Moore plotted the number of transistors on each chip Fit straight line on semi log scale Transistor counts have doubled every 18 months

1,000,000,000

100,000,000 Pentium 4 Pentium III Pentium II Pentium Pro Pentium

Integration Levels SSI: MSI: LSI: VLSI: 10 gates 1000 gates 10,000 gates > 10k gates

10,000,000

Transistors

1,000,000 Intel386 100,000 8086 10,000 8008 4004 1,000 8080 80286

Intel486

1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

Year

The EUVL Process

1. A laser is directed at a jet of xenon gas. When the laser hits the xenon gas, it heats the gas up and creates a plasma. 2. Once the plasma is created, electrons begin to come off of it and it radiates light at 13 nanometres, which is too short for the human eye to see. 3. The light travels into a condenser, which gathers in the light so that it is directed onto the mask. 4. A representation of one level of a computer chip is patterned onto a mirror by applying an absorber to some parts of the mirror but not to others. This creates the mask.

The pattern on the mask is reflected onto a series of four to six curved mirrors, reducing the size of the image and focusing the image onto the silicon wafer. Each mirror bends the light slightly to form the image that will be transferred onto the wafer. This is just like how the lenses in your camera bend light to form an image on film.

Applying Uniform Thin Films

Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley developed advanced multilayer coatings of molybdenum and silicon that can reflect nearly 70 percent of the EUV light at a wavelength of 13.4 nanometers. Applying these coatings evenly is a difficult task even when a mirror is flat, but EUVL mirrors are either convex or concave. Any small non uniformity in the coatings destroys the shape of the optics and results in distorted patterns printed on the chips

The Mask-Making Challenge

Industry experts generally agree that the biggest challenges and risks for the next generation of lithography systems involve the maskthat is, the master pattern used to print the semiconductor circuits onto the silicon wafers or chips. The technology that successfully overcomes the hurdles of mask production has a good chance of becoming the preferred choice.

One key requirement is to produce a mask with essentially no defects. Any small defect ends up being replicated, or printed, in the lithography process onto the computer chips being manufactured, thus damaging the chips complex circuitry. A key breakthrough in this area was the development of an Ultra Clean Ion Beam Sputter Deposition System about two years ago