IMEC installs pre-production EUV litho

GRENOBLE, France - Belgian research institute IMEC has announced it has installed an NXE:3100 pre-production extreme ultra-violet lithography machine from ASML at its Leuven facility.

Luc Van den hove, President and CEO of IMEC is expected to announced the move during his keynote speech at today’s SPIE advanced lithography conference.The installation of the NXE:3100, featuring a considerably higher source power and optimized optics, underscores imec’s ambition to bring EUVL to production level.

The NXE:3100 at IMEC uses a DPP (discharge produced plasma) EUV light source from Extreme Technologies (Ushio). At comparable process conditions the NXE:3100 has recently demonstrated a throughput performance increase of a factor of 20 over the EUV Alpha Demo Tool at IMEC. This increase is based on increased power, higher transmission and dual stages.

 

Imec’s EUVL research program will tackle scanner-specific issues correlated to the difference between EUV lithography and optical lithography through the integration of 14nm logic and 2xnm and 1xnm memory processes. Research will also focus on resists that allow to optimally exploit the resolution of EUV by tackling line-edge roughness and pattern collapse, and on reticle defectivity.

“As reflected in some of our 28 papers at the SPIE advanced lithography conference this week, together with our partners we have achieved important progress in EUV resists and reticle defectivity;” said Kurt Ronse, director of the lithography department at IMEC.