26-Jul-2011: Is EUV the SST of Lithography?
Analogies with Moore’s Law abound. Virtually any trend looks linear on a log-linear plot if the time period is short enough. Some people hopefully compare their industry’s recent history to Moore’s Law, wishfully predicting future success with the air of inevitability that is usually attached to Moore’s Law. Others look to some past trend in the hopes of understanding the future of Moore’s Law. A common analogy of the latter sort is the trend of airplane speed in the last century.
Plotting the cruising speed of new planes against their first year of commercial use, the trend from the 1910s to the 1950s was linear on a log-scale, just like a Moore’s Law plot. But then something different happens. As airspeed approaches the speed of sound, the trend levels off – a physical limit changed the economics of air travel. The equivalent of Moore’s Law for air travel had ended.
For me, the interesting data point is the Concord Supersonic Transport (SST). First flown commercially in 1976, the Mach 2 jet was perfectly in line with the historical log-speed trend of the first 50 years of the industry. And the SST was a technical success – it did everything that was expected of it. Except, of course, make money. The economic limit had been reached, but that didn’t stop many bright people from insisting that the trend must continue, spending billions to make it so. But technological invention couldn’t change the economic picture, and supersonic transportation never caught on.
So here goes my analogy. I think extreme ultraviolet (EUV) will be the SST of lithography. I have little doubt that the technology can be made to work. If it fails (I hope it won’t, but I think it will), the failure will be economic. Like the SST, EUV lithography will never be economical to operate in a mass (manufacturing) market. We can do it, but that doesn’t mean we should.
Of course, this analogy is imperfect, as all such analogies are. Air travel went through just three doublings of speed in 50 years, as opposed to the 36 doublings of transistor count per chip in the last 50 years of semiconductor manufacturing. And the economics of the industries are hardly the same. Still, the analogy has enough weight to make one think. We’ll know soon enough – EUV lithography will likely succeed or fail in the next two years.
As an aside, the first time I heard someone mention the analogy between airspeed and transistor trends was in the early 1990s, when Richard Freeman of AT&T gave a talk. The subject of his presentation? Soft x-ray lithography, what we now call EUV.
Plotting the cruising speed of new planes against their first year of commercial use, the trend from the 1910s to the 1950s was linear on a log-scale, just like a Moore’s Law plot. But then something different happens. As airspeed approaches the speed of sound, the trend levels off – a physical limit changed the economics of air travel. The equivalent of Moore’s Law for air travel had ended.
For me, the interesting data point is the Concord Supersonic Transport (SST). First flown commercially in 1976, the Mach 2 jet was perfectly in line with the historical log-speed trend of the first 50 years of the industry. And the SST was a technical success – it did everything that was expected of it. Except, of course, make money. The economic limit had been reached, but that didn’t stop many bright people from insisting that the trend must continue, spending billions to make it so. But technological invention couldn’t change the economic picture, and supersonic transportation never caught on.
So here goes my analogy. I think extreme ultraviolet (EUV) will be the SST of lithography. I have little doubt that the technology can be made to work. If it fails (I hope it won’t, but I think it will), the failure will be economic. Like the SST, EUV lithography will never be economical to operate in a mass (manufacturing) market. We can do it, but that doesn’t mean we should.
Of course, this analogy is imperfect, as all such analogies are. Air travel went through just three doublings of speed in 50 years, as opposed to the 36 doublings of transistor count per chip in the last 50 years of semiconductor manufacturing. And the economics of the industries are hardly the same. Still, the analogy has enough weight to make one think. We’ll know soon enough – EUV lithography will likely succeed or fail in the next two years.
As an aside, the first time I heard someone mention the analogy between airspeed and transistor trends was in the early 1990s, when Richard Freeman of AT&T gave a talk. The subject of his presentation? Soft x-ray lithography, what we now call EUV.
21-Jul-2011: Frits Zernike, Jr., 1931 - 2011
Lithography lost one of its own on July 12 with the death of Frits Zernike Jr. to Parkinson's disease. Here is his obit from the New York Times:
Born and educated in Groningen, the Netherlands. A physicist with Perkin-Elmer Corp., Silicon Valley Group and Carl Zeiss, and first manager for Dept. of Energy's Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Program. Survived by his wife of 49 years, Barbara Backus Zernike, children Frits III, Harry, and Kate, daughter- and son-in-law Jennifer Wu and Jonathan Schwartz, and three grandchildren: Frits and Nicolaas Schwartz and Anders Zernike. Memorial service will be 3pm Thursday, July 28, at Essex Yacht Club, Novelty Lane, Essex, CT. Donations in his memory may be made to Dance for Parkinson's, c/o NMS, 100 Audubon St, New Haven, CT 06510, or Community Music School, P.O. Box 387, Centerbrook, CT 06409.
Here is an excerpt from a post I made to this blog on February 27, 2009 concerning Frits:
"It was seven years ago that SPIE approached me with the idea of creating a major SPIE award in microlithography. I agreed to head up the effort, and gathered together a committee of other lithographers to establish the award process. Someone on the committee suggested naming the award after Frits Zernike, for three reasons. First, no major optical award had been named in his honor, even though the scientific contributions of this Nobel prize winner are legion. Second, the name has high recognition in the optical lithography community due to the ubiquitous use of the Zernike polynomial for describing lens aberrations. The third reason is more personal – Zernike’s son, Frits Zernike Jr., worked for many years in the field of lithography at Perkin-Elmer and later SVG Lithography before retiring. Some of us on the committee knew him, and when contacted he was very supportive of an award named for his father.”
Born and educated in Groningen, the Netherlands. A physicist with Perkin-Elmer Corp., Silicon Valley Group and Carl Zeiss, and first manager for Dept. of Energy's Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Program. Survived by his wife of 49 years, Barbara Backus Zernike, children Frits III, Harry, and Kate, daughter- and son-in-law Jennifer Wu and Jonathan Schwartz, and three grandchildren: Frits and Nicolaas Schwartz and Anders Zernike. Memorial service will be 3pm Thursday, July 28, at Essex Yacht Club, Novelty Lane, Essex, CT. Donations in his memory may be made to Dance for Parkinson's, c/o NMS, 100 Audubon St, New Haven, CT 06510, or Community Music School, P.O. Box 387, Centerbrook, CT 06409.
Here is an excerpt from a post I made to this blog on February 27, 2009 concerning Frits:
"It was seven years ago that SPIE approached me with the idea of creating a major SPIE award in microlithography. I agreed to head up the effort, and gathered together a committee of other lithographers to establish the award process. Someone on the committee suggested naming the award after Frits Zernike, for three reasons. First, no major optical award had been named in his honor, even though the scientific contributions of this Nobel prize winner are legion. Second, the name has high recognition in the optical lithography community due to the ubiquitous use of the Zernike polynomial for describing lens aberrations. The third reason is more personal – Zernike’s son, Frits Zernike Jr., worked for many years in the field of lithography at Perkin-Elmer and later SVG Lithography before retiring. Some of us on the committee knew him, and when contacted he was very supportive of an award named for his father.”