On Thursday I was EUV focused. My first complaint is that there were too many ASML papers. Of course, this is not ASML’s fault. They are doing most of the important work in this field. Still, some sessions started to feel like an ASML meeting rather than an SPIE meeting.

The first session was directed to high numerical aperture (NA) designs for EUV, and the ASML/Zeiss anamorphic imaging approach looks like a good idea. Current lens designs can’t scale to NA > 0.5 because they result in angles hitting the mask on the order of 9° rather than the current 6°. These higher angles degrade imaging performance, removing most of the advantage of the higher NA. Higher magnification (8X) would fix this, but would result in either much larger mask sizes (an unlikely scenario) or much smaller field sizes (1/4 to be specific). The smaller field size would hit EUV where it hurts most: throughput.

The Zeiss/ASML solution is to have an 8X magnification in the direction needed to lower the incident angles on the mask (the scan direction), keeping the magnification 4X in the slit direction. This results in field sizes 1/2 of the current size, a more manageable problem. And by moving to a design with a central obscuration, the angles on the mirrors are reduced as well, increasing mirror reflectivity and overall optics transmission. To keep the projector at six mirrors, the higher NA will require extreme aspheres, a daunting manufacturing challenge. But as Bernhard Kneer of Zeiss said, in perfect Teutonic style, “Zeiss can do this.” I love it.

I’m pleased to see ASML acknowledge that higher resolution will require higher dose for EUV. They projected a need for 60 mJ/cm2 for 8-nm half pitch. They are also beginning to grapple with the hard problem of stochastics, framing the issue as an overlay (or edge placement) problem rather than a CD control (LWR) problem. An afternoon talk by Jan Mulkens provided a scenario where edge placement errors caused by stochastics were about of equal magnitude as those caused by overlay errors. I agree that this is a very valuable way of looking at the problem.

I did manage to sneak out of the EUV sessions to visit the world of DFM (design for manufacturing) and hear Andrew Burbine of Mentor talk about the Akaike Information Criterion for evaluating model performance. Finally! I teach about this criterion, as well as other model evaluation criteria, in a statistics course I give at the University of Texas. It is quite standard practice in many fields of model calibration, and is taught as a best practice in most textbooks on the topic. It is good to see it come into the field of OPC model calibration. Kudos to Mentor. Now if they can just get their customers to think about such metrics, as well as 4-fold validation, as better judges of model quality than just RMS fit error.

I have a new award: for the talk with the best last-minute title change. From Imec,

Original title: “No More of Moore’s Law: the high cost of dimensional scaling”
New title: “Maintaining Moore’s Law: enabling cost-friendly dimensional scaling”

Do you think an angry boss might have been involved in this change of heart?

Here is my summary of the reported progress in EUV. ASML rolled out their 40W source to the NXE:3300s in the field last year, and it is now the standard source for most of those users. TSMC got the first 80W source late last year, and that tool is operating mostly as expected, but with only 55% availability. The result is about 40 wafers per hour using a 23.5 mJ/cm2 dose. Cymer has shown a bench source operating at 110W for one hour, but the much anticipated 250W source is still a long ways away. I suspect we’ll see a 100W source in the hands of a customer by the end of the year.

This is good progress. Is it enough? Everyone admits that EUV has missed the window for insertion at 10 nm (except maybe the investor relations team at ASML). What will it take to have EUV established as the plan of record for 7 nm? It will take even faster progress this year. I wish the hard working folks at ASML good luck.

Many people ask me what the most exciting or revolutionary idea was this year at SPIE. But that is not really the point. Sure, every now and then some really new idea seems to come out of nowhere and take off. I first mentioned in my 2010 conference blog that DSA was starting to look less like a science project and more like a technology. But it is the accumulation of progress on DSA over the last 5 years that is the real story. And this year is like most years: a year of incremental progress. Like Moore’s Law itself, where 50 years of incremental progress have resulted in revolutionary changes in capability, our incremental progress is best viewed as accumulated progress. We push hard every year, and over the years the change is absolutely remarkable. I enjoyed watching that progress reported here this week. And I’m sure I’ll enjoy it even more next year.