By Jane Lanhee Lee
OAKLAND, Calif. (Reuters) – Silicon Valley-based Applied Materials Inc, among the most important makers of tools for chip manufacturing, said on Tuesday it has started selling a new tool that can lower the cost of a process involving lithography.
Lithography uses light to print a pattern on the wafer, the shiny round discs used for chip making. This process can happen dozens of times per wafer. Each time, the wafer goes through a complex process of depositing material, measuring to make sure the pattern was properly printed, then etching off material to create transistors and other items, and cleaning off the wafer to start all over again.
As the patterns become tiny, reaching the limit of what light can physically print, additional tricks are needed to meet the demands. This is especially true with the latest lithography tool by Dutch tool maker ASML, called EUV, which stands for extreme ultraviolet, the wavelength of light used.
One of the tricks is to repeat a pattern twice.
Applied Materials’ new tool, called Centura Sculpta, is used to shine a light only once for the first pattern and sculpt the final pattern from that.
“We actually create a plasma and we shape it electro statically into what we call a ribbon beam,” Steven Sherman, who led the team that developed the product, explained to Reuters. “We direct it in an angled way to the wafer where we…very precisely remove material at a precision to change the shape of the pattern on the wafer.”
Eliminating even one lithography cycle can save money, energy and water, said Sherman, estimating that for each time the Centura Sculpta is used in the process chip manufacturers can save about $250 million in capital costs for a fabrication facility that can process 100,000 wafers per month.
Applied Materials in a statement quoted chip maker Intel Corp as saying that it collaborated closely in the “optimization of Sculpta” and would be using the technology. It declined to name other customers.
(Reporting By Jane Lanhee Lee; Editing by Leslie Adler)
