Particle accelerators to make chips

The photolithography equipment that designs and produces The Dutch Company ASML They are extraordinarily complex. These integrated circuit manufacturing machines have many sophisticated components, but one of the most advanced is, without a doubt, The ultraviolet light source. Its purpose is to generate extreme ultraviolet radiation (UVE) necessary to transport the geometric pattern that contains the design of the chips to the silicon wafer.

Very broadly, this light source generates UVE radiation using high power lasers capable of instantly heating tens of thousands of tiny tin drops in a single second until they reach a temperature of half a million Celsius degrees. This interaction produces an extremely hot plasma that emits ultraviolet light with a wavelength of 13.5 nm. It looks like a relatively simple strategy, But it is not at all. In fact, the UVE source is one of ASML’s disruptive components.

Pat Gelsinger has joined the Xlight team

Interestingly, to manufacture avant -garde semiconductors using integration technology less than 7 Nm it is not essential to use an ultraviolet light source like the one I just described. You can also opt for other approaches. The UVE lithography machine prototype that, according to leaks, He is testing Huawei In its Dongguan Laboratory (China), it uses an LDP type ultraviolet light source (laser induced discharge), and not LPP class (plasma generated by laser) like the one used by ASML.

Another option requires using a syncrotron -type particle accelerator to generate ultraviolet radiation. This is the path that is following the Chinese Academy of Sciences in The installation that is putting up in Beijing (China). Your heps (High Energy Photon Source or source of high -energy photons) has been designed for Deliver High Power UVE Light simultaneously to several integrated circuit manufacturing plants. However, this is not all. There is at least another option that is also being explored to generate the UVE light.

It is precisely the strategy for which the American company Xlight, to which Pat Gelsinger has just addedthe former director general of Intel, as executive president and the Organization for high energy physics with accelerators of Tsukuba (Japan). Of course, each of these organizations works on their own. Whatever your plan consists of replacing the ultraviolet light source that uses ASML with a free or fel electron laser for its English denomination (Free-electron laser) as those used in particle accelerators.

In fact, in their tests they are using a fel laser generated by a linear accelerator of energy recovery. In theory the radiation delivered by a Fel laser allows to manufacture integrated circuits with a resolution comparable to that of an ultraviolet light source. A priori sounds good, but it seems reasonable to accept that a fel laser linked to a particle accelerator is not exactly cheap. The reason why some technicians prefer this option to which ASML uses is that a single linear accelerator of energy recovery is able to simultaneously feed several lithography machines.

In addition, according to Xlight its Fel laser is designed to feed the next generation of ASML photolithography equipment. In fact, in theory it is four times more powerful than the light source used by this Dutch company in its most advanced machines. According to Gelsinger Xlight technology allows the price to be reduced by wafer by 50% and will achieve a higher wafer performance than current solutions. It sounds good, but we will have to wait until 2028 to know if this proposal is really up to expectations. That year Xlight and ASML hope to try their first Fel laser prototype with a lithography team.

Image | Xight

More information | Xight

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