As feature sizes have shrunk, the semiconductor industry has moved from simple, single-exposure lithography solutions to increasingly complex resolution-enhancement techniques and multi-patterning. Where the design on a mask once matched the image that would be produced on the wafer, today the mask and resulting image … Read More
SPIE 2017: Irresistible Materials EUV Photoresist
Irresistible Materials (IM) is a spin-out of the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom that has been doing research on Photoresist and Spin-On Carbon hard masks for 10 years, most recently with Nano-C on chemistry development. IM has developed a unique EUV photoresist and they are now looking for partners to help bring… Read More
SPIE 2017: EUV Readiness for High Volume Manufacturing
The SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference is the world’s leading conference addressing photolithography. This year on the opening day of the conference, Samsung and Intel presented papers summarizing the readiness of EUV for high volume manufacturing (HVM). In this article, I will begin by summarizing the EUV plans … Read More
AMAT LRCX and EUV Economics
Lam & Applied talked about “sustainable” growth Both expect share gains & growth in a flattish market. We examine the “new, lower, cyclicality”. Although Applied and Lam are fierce competitors , coming at things from different directions, they sounded awfully similar last week.
… Read More
EUV transition comes into focus
We attended ASML’s analyst day in New York on Halloween. We were very impressed with the quality, content and clarity of the presentations and thought it was one of the best strategic positioning presentations we have seen in the semi industry. We also had an opportunity to meet with several members of senior management after… Read More
What is the impact of missing the 7NM node with EUV?
ASML reported a quarter that was slightly below expectations coming in at Euro 1.815B in revenues and Euro 0.93 EPS. Orders were a bit soft at Euro 1.4B but well within the normal quarterly variation of a lumpy business. Euro 28M was lost in a currency adjustment associated with the Hermes acquisition.
The guidance for Q4 was between… Read More
IMEC Technology Forum (ITF) – EUV When, Not If
For me personally EUV has been something of a roller coaster ride over the last several years. I started out a strong believer in EUV but then at the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference in 2014 TSMC gave a very negative assessment of EUV, and there was a SEMATECH paper on high NA EUV that struck me as extremely unlikely to succeed. I … Read More
EUV is coming but will we need it?
I have written multiple articles about this year’s SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference describing all of the progress EUV has made in the last year. Source power is improving, photoresists are getting faster, prototype pellicles are in testing, multiple sites around the world are exposing wafers by the thousands and more. … Read More
Intel EUV Photoresist Progress and ASML High NA EUV
SPIE Days 3 and 4:
Anna Lio of Intel presented EUV resists: What’s next?
Intel wants to insert EUV at 7nm but it has to be ready and economical. Critical Dimension Uniformity (CDU), Line Width Roughness (LWR) and edge placement/stochastics are all stable on 22nm, 14nm and 10nm pilot lines.… Read More
ASML and IMEC EUV Progress
Day 1 of the SPIE conference featured a number of customer updates on the status of their EUV programs. On Tuesday morning we got to hear ASML’s update on their work.… Read More
CHIPS Act dies because employees are fired – NIST CHIPS people are probationary