45 to 32 nm: Another Evolutionary Transition
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Most companies will introduce immersion lithography at the 45 nm node. As this issue was going to print, AMD (Sunnyvale, Calif.) and IBM (Yorktown Heights, N.Y.) announced that they had successfully completed their development work on the first-generation immersion lithography process using water, and that the yields on the new immersion tool were equivalent to those attained using dry ArF lithography. This is very significant, since it is early evidence that immersion lithography is likely to work in production and, just as importantly, will be delivered in time for 45 nm. According to Nick Kepler, vice president of logic technology development at AMD, much of the success can be attributed to its close R&D alliance with IBM, work performed with ASML (Veldhoven, Netherlands), and access to one of the first immersion tools at Albany Nanotech (Albany, N.Y.). Paul Agnello, project manager for 45 nm CMOS device and integration at IBM, stated that the most significant defects — air bubbles and wafer drying spots — had been taken care of. This advancement is part of the reason AMD will be able to ramp to 45 nm six months ahead of schedule, according to Kepler.
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