The Fine Print

April 23, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (3)

When Intel speaks, people are generally interested. And when the überchipmaker says it won’t be using EUV lithography to introduce 22 nm technology into its chips, people take notice. And so, like many others, I was quick to click on yesterday’s headline, “Intel: ‘EUV Facts Don’t Add Up’ for 22 nm in 2011.” It’s somewhat early still, but so far the article has garnered close to 3× as many page views as the next most popular article on our site this week (a story about Hynix cutting its capital spending, in case you’re interested). I’m not surprised, and actually went to our web analytics tool today specifically to confirm my suspicions.

April 8, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

Although plenty of people will tell you that the switch from 300 to 450 mm wafers is going to have to happen at some point, and most likely around the 2012 timeframe, the conversation is far from over. I understand the reluctance to embrace this change from a tool manufacturer’s point of view, and probably even more so from a wafer supplier’s point of view, but I hadn’t thought about the impact that 450 mm wafers would have when it comes to particle contamination and the already shrinking lithography process window.

I was out at Sematech’s Surface Preparation and Cleaning Conference (SPCC) last week in Austin, and had an interesting conversation with a wet cleans engineer at a major memory manufacturer. The point he made was about how much more importan...Read More

March 3, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (5)

The Molecular Imprints folks seem to have very bright outlooks on their future lately – they speak in a way that is more upbeat than I’ve heard them in the past, like they’re finally really getting somewhere in the semiconductor industry. “The semiconductor industry is beginning, I think, to pick up a lot of interest,” CEO Mark Melliar-Smith beamed. “If you look at the presentations that are going on at SPIE… we’ve got Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, IBM and Seagate. It’s a real who’s who of memory and technology companies. And it’s a very impressive list.”

And now, of course, there’s Sematech. When I had this conversation with the folks at Molec...Read More

February 28, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

As is often the case during the nighttime panels at SPIE, there was a fair bit of silliness in Tuesday night’s panel discussion, “Future Projection Lithography: Optical or EUV?” It’s a serious enough question, but after a very long day of listening to detailed technical presentations, attending customer/supplier meetings, and perusing the exhibit floor, these leaders of the teams trying to find answers to extremely difficult lithographic challenges were ready to loosen up a bit.

The tone was set very aptly by IBM’s Kit Ausschnitt, who entertained the audience with a reading of his latest musical adaptation — this time, with apologies to Bob Dylan, with Blowin’ in Our Wind:

February 21, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

The American National Society of Professional Engineers has officially designated this week Engineers Week. I, for one, don’t want to miss this opportunity to give a big virtual hug (I’ll even throw in a virtual smooch) to all the outstanding lithography engineers working so hard to keep us on Moore’s Law.

How many times have we all heard about the imminent demise of optical lithography? If not for the very smart tricks developed by very smart engineers, it would’ve been dead long ago. And yet it’s as alive as ever. The engineering issues are getting tougher and tougher, and it’s an incredible amount of work that continues to go into developing such creative solutions in illumination, OPC, phase shiftin...Read More