Integrated circuit EUV technology innovation draws semiconductor blueprint

Semiconductor scaling (Scaling) is one of the hottest topics in the semiconductor industry. As most electronic components and storage units, including DRAM and other chip components, tend to be ultra-miniaturized, the demand for highly integrated technology is gradually increasing, and ultra-small chips will be able to store and quickly process astronomical amounts of data.

Today, the core of semiconductor scaling (Scaling) is a new generation of exposure technology - Extreme Ultra Violet (Extreme Ultra Violet, referred to as EUV) technology.

"Moore's Law is over" Semiconductor miniaturization technology is in a bottleneck

Semiconductor miniaturization has entered the 10-nanometer era, and the previous "Multi Patterning" technology no longer works. Because, in the 10-nanometer chip manufacturing process, the previous argon fluoride exposure technology (Argon Fluoride, ArF for short) has fallen into a bottleneck. To date, the semiconductor industry has followed the "Moore's Law" of doubling chip integration every 24 months. However, as the lithography process becomes more and more difficult, Moore's Law, which was once brilliantly used, will eventually be eliminated.

The photolithography process is one of the semiconductor manufacturing processes that use lasers to draw ultra-micro circuits on the wafer. The process of transferring the circuit pattern to the wafer is similar to the process of making traditional photos. Therefore, the English word "photolithography process" has "Photo". word.

"Photolithography" is a pattern transfer and copying technology, which realizes the appearance of an The shadow copy is transferred to the wafer. This formation of pre-designed patterns on wafers is a key process in semiconductor manufacturing. In this process, the fineness of the circuit pattern is a decisive factor for the competitiveness of semiconductor technology.

"Scaling", that is, reducing the length of the gates of transistors in semiconductor circuits, has always been regarded as the most important issue in the industry. The transistor switch is like a bridge connecting the source and drain stages, and it is the valve that regulates the current. Therefore, the shorter the length of the switch, the greater the number of electrons flowing from the source to the drain, and the correspondingly faster the circuit runs.

In recent years, semiconductor exposure equipment has developed rapidly, and all use larger lenses or short-wave light sources with high numerical aperture (NA). But existing liquid immersion argon fluoride exposure equipment (ArF) will reach its limit when the gate length shrinks below 30 nanometers.

DRAM chips up to 18 nanometers use multiple imaging technologies, but this will increase the number of processes, reduce productivity, and increase material costs, resulting in increased costs. When the number of processing steps reaches 500-600, it can be seen that the technology has come to an end. The only solution to this problem relies on short-wave light, drawing circuits with finer "slim strokes".