I missed Monday’s papers, but I’m told that there were some good ones. On Tuesday, the highlight was ASML’s status report on their progress. In short, their progress has been remarkable. They have 800 people working on EUV lithography. Their very large EUV tool production facility opened in April of this year. It is rumored that they have invested $1B in EUV. Quite literally, they have bet the company on EUV. And when they present on their status, EUV lithography has the sense of inevitability.

[Aside: Nikon is much further behind. They have one in-house development tool, and their plan is to ship the first real tool they make to customers as a high-volume manufacturing tool in 2013. I’m doubtful. It is clear that Nikon has been unwilling to bet their company on the success of EUV lithography. Can you blame them? Canon is out of the picture. They presented an EUV lens design – that’s as far as they’ve gotten.]

Does the impressive progress of ASML mean that EUV lithography is on track to be ready for manufacturing in 2013? No. The problem is that the three major potential show-stoppers (source power, mask defectivity, and resist performance) are all outside of ASML’s control. Here’s my take on the status of these three challenges.

Source Power – Cymer has become the only game in town. The other source vendors are just too far behind. And while Cymer has made good progress, there is a long way to go (both in power and reliability, two related quantities). I find it troubling that their source development plan requires 90% of the source power improvement to come in the last 10% of the project timeline. Maybe they will do it, but the risk of failure is very high.

Mask Defectivity – Progress on this front has been too slow. Worse yet, we still don’t have measurement tools that can find the smallest defects, so we don’t even know how big the problem is. This does not inspire confidence. SEMATECH’s efforts to create a new consortium to fund mask inspection tool development (about to get underway) will likely be too little too late.

Resist Performance – There has been some good progress on resist sensitivity and resolution. But line-edge roughness (LER) is still too big by a factor of 2 or 3, and it is not getting better. There is no good model for predicting LER, and the Edisonian trial-and-error approach to finding a low-LER resist is unlikely to be fruitful. Hope seems to be pinned on post-development treatments to smooth out the roughness. But I’m not convinced that such treatments are anything more than cosmetic. Low-frequency LER is what will cause problems for devices, and post-development treatments do not (and can not) smooth out these low-frequency errors. My long-held view that the ultimate limits of optical lithography will be governed by line-edge roughness remains intact.

Overall, though, the success or failure of EUV lithography, like any manufacturing technology, will be determined by costs. Source power and resist sensitivity at adequate performance will determine throughput (wafers out per hour). Mask defectivity affects yield (good wafers out per hour). Couple that with the cost of the EUV scanner and we can estimate the cost effectiveness of EUV lithography. So how much will an EUV scanner cost? In response to a question from the audience, ASML said that an EUV scanner will weigh three times as much as a 193 scanner. Assuming price is proportional to weight (a surprisingly good correlation!), that means an EUV scanner will cost three times as much as a 193 scanner (over $100M). Since the competition for EUV lithography is double patterning, that means an EUV scanner will cost more than two 193 scanners. If we are generous and assume an EUV scanner costs the same as two double-patterning-capable 193 immersion scanners, the only way for EUV to be cost effective will be if its throughput equals today’s 193 throughput – about 150 wafers/hr. That has to be the target for EUV. Will they make it?

Postscript: As the symposium ended and all the participants filed out of the room, I noticed a different meeting taking place in the conference room next door. Glancing in the open door, I could see it was very different from meetings that I am used to – it was the contestants for the Miss Prague 2009 competition. Just a reminder that there are other things going on in the world besides lithography.