Forward Thinking Blog The Promises and Challenges of EUV at GlobalFoundries

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Feb. 16, 2018 – One of the reasons I was so intrigued to visit GlobalFoundries earlier this month was for the opportunity to see an EUV lithography machine in place and to hear about how the firm plans to use it.

Not long ago, I had a chance to visit a factory in Connecticut where ASML builds many of the components for such an EUV machine. These enormous tools use extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light shone through a mask to delineate the lines for very small features of chips, and are some of the most complex machines in the world. They are designed to take the place of the now-standard immersion lithography machines that use light with a wavelength of 193nm in some layers of the chipmaking process.

To recap, an EUV machine is incredibly complicated. As George Gomba, Vice President of Technology Research for GlobalFoundries explained it, the process begins with a 27-kilowatt CO2 laser that is fired through a beam transport and focusing system onto tiny tin droplets (around 20 microns in diameter) produced by a droplet generator in a plasma vessel. The first pulse flattens the droplet and the second vaporizes it, creating laser-produced plasma (LPP). EUV photons emitted from the plasma are collected by a special mirror that reflects 13.5nm wavelength light and that radiation is transmitted to an intermediate focus point where it enters the scanner and is projected through a mask onto the silicon wafer. Gomba, who works out of the Albany Nanotech facility, said he has been working with preproduction EUV systems since 2013, and now expects EUV to be in full production at GlobalFoundries by the second half of 2019.

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