The Future of Lithography and the End of Moore’s Law!

The Future of Lithography and the End of Moore’s Law!
by Paul McLellan on 07-24-2012 at 10:35 pm

Thisblog with a chart showing that the cost of given functionality on a chip is no longer going to fall is, I think, one of the most-read I’ve ever written on Semiwiki. It is actually derived from data nVidia presented about TSMC, so at some level perhaps it is two alpha males circling each other preparing for a fight. Or, in this… Read More


EUV: No Pellicle

EUV: No Pellicle
by Paul McLellan on 07-22-2012 at 10:00 pm

There’s a dirty secret problem about EUV that people don’t seem to to be talking about. There’s no pellicle on a EUV mask. OK, probably you have no idea what that means, a lot of jargon words, nor why it would be important, but it seems to me it could be the killer problem for EUV.

In refractive masks, you print a pattern… Read More


Directed Self Assembly

Directed Self Assembly
by Paul McLellan on 07-19-2012 at 9:00 pm

At Semicon, Ben Rathsack of Tokyo Electron America talked about directed self assembly (DSA) at the standing-room only lithography morning. So what is it? Self assembly involves taking two monomers that don’t mix and letting them polymerise (so like styrene forming polystyrene). Since they won’t mix they will … Read More


EUV Masks

EUV Masks
by Paul McLellan on 07-17-2012 at 11:00 pm

This is really the second part to this blog about the challenges of EUV lithography. The next speaker was Franklin Kalk who is CTO of Toppan Photomasks. He too emphasized that we can make almost arbitrarily small features but more and more masks are required (not, that I suspect, he would complain being in the mask business). For EUV… Read More