Message 33050895
The chip industry is preparing for the next phase of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography at 3nm and beyond, but the challenges and unknowns continue to pile up.
In R&D, vendors are working on an assortment of new EUV technologies, such as scanners, resists, and masks. These will be necessary to reach future process nodes, but they are more complex and expensive than the current EUV products. For example, ASML is developing new EUV scanners, including a next-generation system with a staggering price tag of more than $300 million per unit. So far, it’s unclear if these systems will arrive on time.
Today, meanwhile, Samsung and TSMC already are using current-generation EUV in production at 7nm and 5nm, and Intel is preparing to deploy it for the first time. Situated in a fab, an EUV lithography scanner patterns features on chips at 13.5nm wavelengths. EUV and other equipment help chipmakers to reduce the feature sizes in chips at each node, enabling more transistors to be packed on a die.<snip> |
