SPIE Advanced Lithography Preview

Next week is the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference in San Jose, the premier conference for advanced lithography used to produce state-of-the-art semiconductors. Last year I blogged after the conference about some of the key points I heard at the conference and this year I plan to do the same.

Last year’s blog is available HERE:

One of the things that really struck me last year was how pessimistic the general mood was about EUV and how optimistic the people I spoke to were about the extendibility of multi-pattering. In the last year it seems to me that EUV has picked up some momentum so I am very interested to see what the general tone is about EUV and multi patterning.

I have been going through the program for the conference looking for sessions I want to attend.

Monday morning and early afternoon have some interesting sessions on EUV and multi patterning that look like they will address the issues I spoke about above. There is also some interesting etch session papers in the afternoon.

Tuesday morning will see the EUV sources addressed. The output of the EUV sources is a key gating item for high volume usage of EUV so this will be an important session. Nikon will also discuss their non EUV roadmap, Nikon is no longer working on EUV and instead focused on 450mm ArFi. There are also interesting sessions on directed self-assembly (DSA) and negative tone develop (NTD). I am hearing that DSA has been used to make DRAMs and may be close to at least partial implementation so it will be interesting to see what is presented. NTD is also a technique that is seeing growing usage for ArFi layers with dark field masks. Tuesday afternoon will feature more interesting sessions on EUV and DSA.

Wednesday morning includes more interesting DSA and etch presentations as well as multi-patterning presentations. Wednesday afternoon features a couple of interesting papers on multi-beam e-beam lithography.

Thursday warps the conference up with additional papers on EUV systems and processes for sub 10nm resolution.

Stay tuned for my post conference blog on what I see and hear at the conference.

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