Liquid Immersion, Nanoimprint Litho to Extend Moore’s Law

Online staff -- Electronic News, 11/16/2004

While some doomsayers predict Moore’s Law will soon come to an end, at least two new nanolithography techniques promise to sustain the chip industry’s performance curve for at least another decade, according to the latest report from Lux Research.

With the semiconductor industry facing a crisis as current processes for building high-performance chips reach their limits and heat dissipation makes raising the clock speed of chips impractical, the only way chip manufacturers can sustain performance is to put more circuits into less space. That requires a new approach to the lithography process.

“Lithography is the single most expensive part of the semiconductor manufacturing process, accounting for one-third of the cost of each chip today,” said Matthew Nordan, VP of research at N.Y.-based Lux, in a statement.

“[Lithography is] also the bottleneck that stands to limit the power of microprocessors and the capacity of memory chips. With $3.9 billion in lithography tools sold last year, it’s no surprise that 10 different platforms are now competing to take over when today’s process runs out of steam. All of these 10 nanolithography platforms focus on patterning circuits smaller than 100nm in size” Nordan continued.

Lux ranked competing nanolithography platforms on potential impact and level of development and found that 193nm liquid immersion lithography will be adopted en masse in 2007 and will be used as a stopgap solution before hitting a performance wall in 2011.

Further, nanoimprint lithography looks best positioned as the long-term solution after 2011 because of its technical advantages, escalating amount of research activity, and feasible solutions to technical challenges.

Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) may outpace nanoimprint if significant technical breakthroughs are made in the next four years, the firm said. This technology has been the subject of longstanding research from the likes of IBM and Intel but has not yet proved viable. Another little-known X-ray projection from Adelphi Technology also holds potential, the firm added.

“Semiconductor industry players will need to prepare for a radically new platform…[and] assess these new platforms based on their merits, not on the millions of dollars in sunk cost plowed into some which no longer look compelling,” said Will Arora, senior associate at Lux, in a statement.

The firm also believes nanoimprint toolmakers EVG, Molecular Imprints, Nanonex, Obducat and SUSS MicroTec should form a consortium to advance common interests and battle skepticism from major chipmakers.

Finally, companies that make reduction masks and lenses would be well-served to identify new ways to remain relevant should a non-optical tool like nanoimprint be adopted, which would decrease the need for their products, researchers said.