SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference 2019 Overall Impressions

Last week I attended the 2019 SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference. I gave two presentations, attended dozens of papers and conducted three interviews. I will be doing some detailed write ups particularly on EUV but I am waiting for the presentations from several of the papers. In the mean time I thought I would put some overall impressions together.

Canon event
The conference began for me on Sunday morning at a Canon private briefing for about 50 customers and partners where I was an invited speaker. One of the other speakers was Yan Borodovksy, a former senior fellow at Intel (Intel’s highest technical level), now retired and a fellow of SPIE. Yan made what I thought was the funniest comment of the entire week. He basically said, “Moore’s law isn’t dead, it just had a stroke and stopped moving on one side”.

Nikon LithoVision
Where the Canon event was private and limited to customers and partners, Nikon’s LithoVision is a more public event attended by over 500 people. I was also invited to speak at LithoVision and I have written my talk up here.

My favorite talk of the event was Anton Devillier’s animated and entertaining talk about what he would tell lithographers if he could go back in time. He had a very cool illustration of a worm hole and talked with so much energy that at one point his lavalier mic went flying.

Overall Conference
I thought the overall conference was relatively quiet this year. Last year was as Chris Mack put it, “The year of Stochastics” where it seems everyone had just woken up to the idea that we had to actually make EUV work and now had to face the practical problems. This year to me was much more a year of quiet progress and continuing investigation.

My impression was ASML and Imec were the key presenters this year providing a lot of the material. Imec alone was first author on 32 papers and coauthors on even more

There was a lot of papers on EUV against the background that after many years waiting for implementation, that EUV is actually ramping up in production now.

The following isn’t specific to the conference but sets a background on EUV.

Samsung is currently ramping up a 7nm EUV based foundry logic process with approximately 7 EUV layers including what we believe to be a 36nm metal pitch printed with EUV. TSMC has been in production with their optical 7nm 7FF foundry logic process since last year and is now ramping their 7nm 7FF+ process with 5 EUV layers. We believe the minimum EUV pitch on 7FF+ is 40nm. The word out of TSMC is that the process is going very well including the performance of EUV. Later this year TSMC is expected to begin risk starts on a 5nm foundry logic process with more extensive EUV usage. We believe the 5nm process will include 28nm minimum metal pitches produced by EUV. Once again, the word out of TSMC is this process is going very well including EUV. Intel is also working on EUV for their 7nm process due in 2020. EUV is clearly ramping into high volume manufacturing and by all accounts the implementation is going well.

ASML
ASML provided updates on the current 0.33 NA systems and the 0.50 NA (high NA) system in development and I sat down and interviewed Mike Lercel (Director of Strategic Marketing) as well. I will provide a more detailed write up on these systems once I get the ASML presentations. A few initial observations:

[LIST=1]