Quote Originally Posted by saaya View Post
well you know, i never figured out why they poured all that money into eulv...
cause its not going to push the limits all that further... using electrons instead of photons instead would allow much higher accuracy, wouldnt it?

and thx for all your posts flutje, very interesting info indeed!
Its not about accuracy (it is extremely important but not the figure of merit when comparing litho tech usually). The figure of merit is resolution, the defining parameter is wavelength of incident energy. So for current tech we use immersion based 193nm DUV light this combined with alot of tricks (resist trimming, double patterning etc) has gotten use to the 32nm node meaning the gate length is about 40-80nm depending on the tech. So obviously we gotta keep shrinking and that means we will have to keep shrinking the wavelength of incident radiation. EUV at 13.5nm is a great idea with alot of problems. These will be fixed and I bet we will se this working at the sub 22nm nodes. You mentioned ebeam litho and since an electrons wavelength is tied inversely to its kinetic energy @100kV the wavelength is in the pico-meter ranges. obviously much better than EUV or anything else. But as we talked about in a previous thread, right now ebeam litho is a serial process and is incredibly slow. Hopefully a multi beam system will eventually catch up to the throughput of modern optical systems, I shouldnt say hopefully, it will have to.