It\u2019s 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\u2019m always pessimistic about material development projects \u2013 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 \u2013 line edge roughness.<\/p>\n
All in all, this year\u2019s 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\u2019ll take it over boring any day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}