Industry-gov't Consortium Initiative on to push fabs past 0.1 micron By Chappell Brown, EE Times Santa Clara, Calif. -- A high-stakes race is under way for dominance of the next semiconductor generation The start of that competition was signaled by the recent announcement of an industry-government consortium aimed at taking fab equipment beyond 0.1-micron design rules. Aimed at distilling Cold-War technology developed at the national labs for commercial manufacturing, the Extreme Ultraviolet Limited Liability Co.--set up by Advanced Micro Devices, Intel and Motorola--will link up with three Department of Energy labs organized under the umbrella of the Virtual National Laboratory. They are Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and E.O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The three private companies are offering $250 million over the next three years to establish an engineering test stand. The idea is to lead up to beta-test steppers from semiconductor-equipment makers, commercializing technology at extreme-ultraviolet wavelengths. Significantly, Intel Corp. is kicking in the major share of the funding in exchange for first delivery rights on the equipment. "The semiconductor equipment industry has failed to define a clear direction for the next generation of technology, so this initiative is designed to stimulate the development of lithography equipment that will take us beyond tenth-micron features," said Sander Wilson, director of business for the Extreme Ultraviolet Limited Liability Co. (EUV LLC). After developing the beta-test machines in five years, the consortium will then license the technology to equipment makers, with Intel getting preferential delivery, he added. By 2007, fab lines using the equipment are expected to be up and running, turning out ICs containing up to a billion transistors. The EUV initiative may signal an industry move toward X-ray lithography as the technology to replace current optical methods. IBM Corp. has begun a concerted effort to develop the mask technology for direct-proximity X-ray lithography. That will require higher-frequency X-rays produced by large synchrotron sources and extremely precise and thin masks. An IBM X-ray expert will detail the company's rationale for X-ray as a comprehensive solution to future chip fabrication at December's International Electron Devices Meeting. The EUV approach is closer to current optical methods because the lower-frequency radiation can be manipulated with special mirrors. "We will be drawing on laser technology, reflective coatings and other optical systems that were developed during the Cold War by the national labs," said Wilson. The labs have also devised a more manageable means of generating the "soft" X-rays--another name for extreme-UV light--with radiation generated by high-temperature plasmas. Using the optical capability, the extreme-UV light can be applied in a photo-reduction process. That gives a fourfold reduction in features, which will allow the equipment to scale down over time. Wilson said the new approach should last for two decades, or four generations of VLSI technology, taking the industry down to 0.03-micron feature sizes. Not only is the initiative tackling a difficult area of technology, but the pace of the proposed schedule is unprecedented. "This represents a collapse of the usual time line for developing lithography equipment by a factor of two," said Richard Freeman, a Lawrence Livermore laser physicist who is the director of the Virtual National Laboratory. While Freeman is fully confident of the underlying technology that is going into the extreme-UV stepper, turning lab demonstrations into industry practice is a daunting prospect. "[The labs] can always achieve what we call a 'one-off' because we have brilliant engineers and scientists who are not constrained by commercial budgets," he said. "It's another thing to build a system that can be manufactured in thousands of units at a cost the industry can afford." (Next article) (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]

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