Re:Canon Nanoimprint lithography semiconductor manufacturing...
by adrian_b on Monday October 16, 2023 @03:01AM
(#37896624)
There are no lenses for extreme ultraviolet.
The mirror system used to project EUV might be able to do a reduction of the mask image by a small factor, but even so, the size of the features on the mask is too small to allow the production of the masks by photolithography.
As another poster has said, since many years ago the masks are produced by electron-beam lithography, even for traditional UV photolithography.
Electron-beam lithography and ion-beam lithography allow the production of chips with features as small as they can ever be possible (due to atom size constraints), but they make the images too slowly for mass production (because the beam scans sequentially the surface of the wafer), so they can be used only for making masks or for making devices used in research projects, where the cost per device does not matter.
The mirror system used to project EUV might be able to do a reduction of the mask image by a small factor, but even so, the size of the features on the mask is too small to allow the production of the masks by photolithography.
As another poster has said, since many years ago the masks are produced by electron-beam lithography, even for traditional UV photolithography.
Electron-beam lithography and ion-beam lithography allow the production of chips with features as small as they can ever be possible (due to atom size constraints), but they make the images too slowly for mass production (because the beam scans sequentially the surface of the wafer), so they can be used only for making masks or for making devices used in research projects, where the cost per device does not matter.