It’s been over a week since the SPIE 2007 Advanced Lithography symposium has ended. Now that the dust has settled, what is my take on the conference and the state of lithography? I started out being pessimistic about 32nm half-pitch options, but now I am less so. Development of high-index materials for immersion lithography is going better than I expected (I’m always pessimistic about material development projects – they tend to be much harder than most people think), and double patterning is starting to show some interesting results. Coupled with significant improvements in scanner overlay performance, I think double patterning has a real chance of being a viable alternative at or below 35 nm half-pitch, maybe down to 22nm half-pitch. And my opinion as to the ultimate limiter of the capabilities of optical lithography remains the same – line edge roughness.
All in all, this year’s conference reinforced my earlier prediction that 2007 will be a very interesting year in the world of semiconductor lithography. Of course, interesting is not always good (like the Chinese curse), but I’ll take it over boring any day.
But is boring possible (until we are totally stopped by Moore’s wall)? As long as there is progress, it will be used, further squeezing tolerances. Maybe the maskmaker’s vacation was boring, but then consolidation made it less so. And that is just what will happen once technologists run out of cost-viable options: everyone will run into each other at the wall, piling on, and making the business side of it nonboring.