Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen OC_Formula for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com Sept. 28, ASML CTO Martin van den Brink said in an interview with Bits & Chips that the company is implementing its roadmap in an orderly manner, followed by High-NA EUV technology after EUV. ASML is preparing to deliver its first High-NA EUV lithography machine to its customers, which will probably be completed sometime next year, which Martin believes will be achieved, although supply chain problems may still disrupt the plan.

CTOnews.com learned that NA (NumericalAperture), known as numerical aperture, is an important indicator of optical lenses, and general lithography equipment will clearly mark the value of this index. When the wavelength of the light source is constant, the size of the NA directly determines the actual resolution of the lithography machine, which also determines the highest process node that the lithography machine can achieve. High-NA EUV is the next generation of lithography equipment, which can carve out finer circuits than the existing EUV lithography equipment. It is considered to be a game-changing device that will determine the winner of the technology competition in the contract manufacturing market below 3nm.

Van den Brink said that by far, the biggest challenge in developing high High-NA technology is to build metrology tools for EUV optics. The High-NA mirror is twice the size of its predecessor and needs to be kept flat within a range of 20 picometers. This needs to be verified in a vacuum container "big enough to hold half a company", which is located in Zeiss.

High-NA EUV lithography machines consume more power than existing EUV lithography machines, increasing from 1.5MW to 2MW. The main reason is because of the light source, High-NA uses the same light source requires an additional 0.5MW, and ASML uses water-cooled copper wire to power it.

As for the technical solution after High-NA EUV technology, Martin said that ASML is working on reducing the wavelength, but he personally does not think Hyper-NA is feasible, they are studying it, but that does not mean it will be put into production. Martin suspects that High-NA will be the last NA, and the current road to semiconductor lithography may have come to an end.

The High-NA EUV system will provide 0.55 numerical aperture, which will be more accurate than the previous EUV system with 0.33 numerical aperture lens, and can be patterned with higher resolution to achieve smaller transistor features. When it comes to the Hyper-NA system, it will be higher than 0. 7 or even 0. 75, which can be done in theory. Technically speaking, it can also be done. But if the cost of hyper-NA grows as fast as High-NA, it will be almost economically infeasible. Therefore, the main goal of the Hyper-NA research project is to come up with smart solutions to keep the technology under control in terms of cost and manufacturability.

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