The SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium always begins on Monday, unless you take (or teach) a short course the day before. Only 12 courses are being taught this year, a low not seen this millennium and indicative of austere times. Still, short course attendance was up a tiny bit, and my course was full, and as always was fun to teach. I had two young engineers from Egypt in my class, and when I congratulated them on recent events in their country, the class broke into spontaneous applause in solidarity. Nice.

There are 567 papers at the conference (and in this year’s most inane statistic, 8.5% of the authors are from Texas). Attendance at the symposium is up about 10% – a good sign, though we are still way down from our peak of 2007. I suspect those heady days will not return. But the crowd is energetic, with passions, excitement and doubts about the future of lithography alternating in about equal measure.

Monday began with awards at the plenary session. It was great to see Andy Neureuther, (mostly) retired from UC Berkeley, receive the 8th Frits Zernike award. Andy’s first paper on lithography simulation was published 40 years ago, and his body of work has been a tremendous influence on me. Four new SPIE Fellows were inducted, and I was ecstatic to see my dear friend John Petersen so honored. Bob Socha of ASML become our youngest Fellow, though thankfully he is not as young as he looks.

The two plenary talks were two sides on one coin: why more Moore’s Law is more goodness. Luc Van den Hove, the President of CEO of Imec (and someone who once gave papers at this conference – a long time ago) said more Moore would make the world a better place. I’m not sure that his example of an electronic nose for smart phones convinced me. He also didn’t convince me when he said, discussing lithography alternatives, that “EUV lithography is the more developed, more mature technology.” But then, Imec has always been a cheerleader for their Dutch neighbors.

Shang-Yi Chiang of TSMC gave a more grounded plenary talk, saying more Moore meant more money. He is hoping for EUV lithography at the 14-nm node, but only if the throughput is >100 wafers per hour. He reiterated what we all already know, that lithography cost is the biggest challenge to extending Moore’s law through the rest of this decade. Which is why no one likes double patterning (though everyone is doing it). While Chiang struck an agnostic tone about various lithography alternatives, he put on his cheerleader hat to talk about 450-mm wafers. He is hoping to find various governments that will put up $750M over the next three years to induce tool makers to develop 450-mm tools. Even if we find the money (and good luck with that), I think this is a lost cause. How about this for a fanciful thought: imagine a 450-mm production EUV lithography tool.

By 10:30 am the technical talks began. Patrick Naulleau discussed the challenges of EUV resists and lamented that EUV resist resolution has been stuck at 20-nm lines and spaces for the last three years. This doesn’t surprise me, since we haven’t had a new EUV exposure tool in the last three years. We shouldn’t expect a magic resist to make up for a lack of tools. Jim Thackeray said there is still room to improve EUV resists (as of course is true). At 193-nm we worked hard to make our resist more transparent, but at EUV we are trying to make them more absorbing (every photon is precious, and unabsorbed photons are wasted photons). Teflon has the kind of absorption we need, so know we just need to figure out how to make our resists more Teflon-like. Roel Gronheid of Imec gave a great talk, showing what I thought was a very convincing demonstration that secondary electron blur in EUV resists was less than 4 nm. One less thing to worry about, since none of us know how to reduce this source of resist blur.

(By the way, for those of you wondering why my posts are running late this year, I can only say this. I have three oral papers to give, and only one is ready.)

In the long view, one thing is clear: the remarkable success of optical lithography at propelling Moore’s Law forward has been a long, steady ride. Moore’s Law has been lithography-limited since the early 1970s, so the steady progress in Moore’s Law over the last 40 years mirrors the steady improvement in resolution that optical lithography has been able to deliver in manufacturing.

But while the results of lithography seem to improve at an astonishingly steady pace, the path to get there has been anything but smooth. There are three big trends driving the improvements in resolution: lowering the wavelength of the imaging light, increasing the numerical aperture (NA) of the imaging lens, and being more clever at squeezing every bit of resolution that physics will allow (including the manipulation of the angle, phase and polarization of the light, as well as significant improvements in the performance of the photoresists used). Let’s look at each trend in more detail.

Lowering wavelength is an obvious way to improve resolution, but also a difficult one. A change in wavelength requires a change in the light source, the lens materials, and the photoresist – that is, almost everything. Since the early days of 436-nm light, we have steadily progressed to 365 nm, then 248 nm, and today’s standard 193 nm. Each change was extremely difficult, but ultimately rewarding. Lithography companies were born and were lost in the transitions. But the story is not quite so linear. The industry spent a fair amount of time and money to develop 157-nm lithography, only to abandon the effort as not worthwhile. And before that a major industry (and government) investment in x-ray lithography become a major failure (and a running joke among lithographers – will the new technology be our savior, or the next x-ray?). Today, the focus is on a another disruptive change in wavelength – to the 13.5-nm wavelength of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography (the wavelength formerly known as soft x-ray). The outcome of that effort is yet to be decided.

Numerical apertures have risen from the Perkin-Elmer Micralign’s 0.16 to today’s best 1.35 (NAs great than 1 required the development of immersion lithography, an absolutely amazing technology). But 1.35 appears to be the limit. An effort to develop high refractive index lens and fluid materials was deemed too difficult and was dumped a few years ago. There’s no more room at the top.

Innovations like phase-shifting masks and off-axis illumination have coupled with significant improvements in photoresist performance and manufacturing process control to allow practical resolution to approach the theoretical limits. While I’m sure there are still innovations to be had (not to mention the dozens of interesting ideas that have been left behind), current performance is so close to the best that physics will allow that there is very little room left to squeeze.

Oh, and by the way, this forty years of (sometimes rocky) progress in resolution has come at no extra cost to make the chips (the cost per square centimeter of finished silicon has stayed about constant for 40 years). Improved yields, larger wafers, and much greater lithography tool throughput has meant that today’s US $50 M lithography scanner can still churn out chips that can be profitably sold for on the order of $10.

So what’s in store for the future of lithography? The only current effort that has the potential to keep us on track using the traditional three scaling approaches is EUV lithography. But the challenges for EUV are still immense, and I remain skeptical. An alternate path is the use of double patterning (or quadruple patterning!), but there the higher costs may prove limiting. This technology is now widely used for making Flash memory chips, but the extension to logic chips is hard.

It is an interesting time in the world of lithography technology – and progress in developing the next bit of technology will be anything but predictable. Companies are beginning to place their bets on competing approaches, and the certainty of success is low. And looming in front of us is possibly the ultimate physical limit: line-edge roughness caused by the stochastic nature of light and chemicals near the molecular scale. It’s fun, and frightening.

But there is one thing everyone in the lithography community agrees on: the place to go to follow the latest progress in the field is the SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium, which starts Monday in San Jose. How far has EUV lithography progressed? How big are the remaining roadblocks? What innovations in double patterning might make this approach more practical? Has anyone made any progress in reducing line-edge roughness? I’m anxious to learn the answers. That’s why I’m here.

I’m excited to announce my recent appointment as editor-in-chief of SPIE’s Journal of Micro/Nanolithography, MEMS, and MOEMS (effective 1 January 2012). I’ll be taking over from Burn Lin, the founding editor whose vision built this journal into the preeminent peer-reviewed publication on micro- and nanofabrication. Big shoes to fill. With help from the lithography, MEMS and MOEMS community, I hope to build on an already excellent foundation.

To read the SPIE press release on this appointment, click here.

Have you ever been reading through my textbook Fundamental Principles of Optical Lithography and thought “Boy, if I only had a set of Matlab exercises to do, I could really learn this stuff!”? Well if a laboratory manual full of Matlab problems is the only thing keeping you from learning optical lithography, your wait is over! Kevin Berwick of the Dublin Institute of Technology has been teaching a lithography course using my textbook and has been assigning Matlab problems to his class to help them get at the details of the topic. He has now collected up those problems and published a book called Optical Lithography Modelling with MATLAB®, Laboratory Manual to accompany Fundamental Principles of Optical Lithography, by Chris Mack. And if that is not enough to put any lithographer in a good mood, this book is available to be downloaded free! Click here for more information. A great Christmas present for that hard to shop for lithographer!