Cymer receives funding to ready EUV lithography light source
By Mark LaPedus
Semiconductor Business News
(02/08/02 08:30 a.m. EST)
SAN DIEGO -- Hoping to solve a major problem in the next-generation lithography (NGL) arena, Cymer Inc. here announced that it has received funding to help develop laser light sources for tools, based on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology.
Executives from Cymer indicated that the funds came from a "major chip maker," but it declined to identify the company or amount of the funding.
The funds will be used to help develop and commercialize laser sources for EUV tools, said Brian Klene, senior vice president of marketing and business development for Cymer. The San Diego-based company is a supplier of excimer light sources for lithography equipment.
In 1997, Cymer began to develop EUV-enabled laser sources, based the company's proprietary dense-plasma laser technology, Klene said. More recently, the company has developed several prototypes based on the technology, and hopes to ship its first commercial systems by early-2003, he said.
"We've made significant progress," he said. "The key issue with EUV sources is to scale up the power and increase the overall life of the source," he said in an interview with SBN.
Cymer is one of approximately 17 entities that are racing each other to develop viable power sources for EUV technology, according to analysts.
But the Cymer executive confirmed that the company and its rivals have a "long ways to go" before they can solve the critical power issues for EUV tools. At present, for example, an EUV alpha tool that is being developed by a U.S.-led consortium currently runs at 10 watts of power, but the unit must run at two to four times that specification to make it a production-worthy system, according to officials in the consortium (see Feb. 28 story).
Last year, the U.S.-led consortium announced that it had developed and demonstrated the world's first exposure tool based on EUV (see Feb. 27 story ).
The Extreme Ultraviolet LLC consortium hopes to develop its EUV-based tool for developing next-generation devices with features sizes of 0.07 micron and below. The consortium is made up of Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, Infineon, Intel, Micron, Motorola, and U.S. Department of Energy's national laboratories.
A production-worthy EUV tool is not expected to be out in the market until 2007--or later, according to analysts. But some chip makers, namely Intel Corp., are looking to get their hands on a production tool before 2005.
But some believe that optical lithography is expected to last until the end of this decade, pushing out the need for NGL tools to about 2010, at least according to the 2001 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) (see Nov. 29 story).
ASML Holding N.V. of the Netherlands is expected to take the take EUV technology from the U.S.-led consortium and develop a commercial tool before the end of this decade. Meanwhile, Japan's Canon Inc. and Nikon Corp. are also separately working on EUV tools as well. Nikon is also developing a competitive NGL technology called electron-beam projection lithography (EPL) technology.
Meanwhile, the EUV laser-source equipment market is also up for grabs--and the stakes are huge.
Today, lithography tools make use of third-party excimer laser sources from Cymer, Lambda Physik GmbH, and others. Laser sources are separate, standalone pieces of equipment that are "loosely coupled" with lithography tools.
In sharp contrast, the EUV sources will be "tightly coupled" or integrated with the EUV tools themselves, according to Klene. "The market for EUV laser sources is much different than deep-UV laser sources," he said.
At present, the EUV alpha tool being developed by the U.S.-led consortium is using a laser-produced plasma (LPP) source. Developed by TRW Space and Electronics Group, the technology uses a laser material, called Xenon, to generate a source for the EUV tool, according to TRW.
But there is no guarantee that a commercial EUV tool will utilize TRW's LPP source technology, according to Cymer's Klene. The eventual suppliers of commercial EUV tools--including ASML, Canon, and perhaps Nikon--will likely choose between one or more of the plethora of laser-source technologies in the market, he said.
At present, TRW is pushing its LPP technology. In addition, Sandia National Laboratories--one of the members of the U.S.-led EUV consortium--is developing an electric capillary discharge source for EUV tools. The technology makes use of a pulser that is capable of driving up the power of EUV tools, according to Sandia.
In another effort, Lambda Physik GmbH, a supplier of laser sources for exposure tools, is developing what the company calls a compact Z-pinch source for EUV tools.
Executives from Cymer claim that the company's EUV source technology has several advantages over its competitors. The company claims that its dense-plasma focus technology uses Xenon as a gas source, which is sufficient to boost the overall power in EUV tools.
The problem with LLP technology is that "it tends to be very big and expensive," said Nigel Farrar, director of lithography applications at Cymer. "There is an issue with discharge [with electric capillary technology]," he said.
Currently, Cymer is developing laser-source prototypes, which operate at 400-Hertz, with a burst operation of 2500-Hertz and a 4% power effiency. But the eventual goal with this equipment is to drive the power up to 5-6-KHz at a continuous rate, Cymer said.
Until the EUV market emerges, meanwhile, Cymer will continue to push its laser-source equipment for 248-, 193-, and 157-nm lithography applications. "We see a lot of demand for 193-nm," Klene said. "We've shipped some 157-nm sources in 1999 and 2000. But we don't expect the 157-nm market to emerge until 2003."
On Tuesday, Cymer reported a 3% sequential increase in revenues to $54.8 million in the fourth quarter compared to $53.0 million in Q3 of 2001, due to increased shipments of 193-nm light sources. Cymer's revenues were 46.4% lower than $102.2 million in Q4 of 2000.
The lithography light source supplier posted a net loss of $1.9 million in the fourth quarter compared to a net income of $20.2 million in the same period last year. The company narrowed its loss from $2.8 million in Q3 of 2001 (see Feb. 5 story). |
