IBM, AMD to Report the First Chip Built With Extreme Ultra-Violet Lithography - The next step is perfecting and extending the technique

AMD and IBM engineers have jointly announced a new advancement in the microprocessor design: they succeeded in creating a 45-nanometer processor using full Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV) lithography
on its square silicon surface. Their achievement may be regarded as a new milestone in chip design and open the gates for semiconductors with structures of 16-nanometer or even smaller.

The test chip was created using 193-nanometer Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) technology. The chip has been molded in AMD's Fab 36 located in Dresden, Germany. The two teams then patterned the first layer of metal interconnects using IBM's 13.5-nanometer ASML EUV lithography scanner installed in server manufacturer's Research Facility at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) in Albany, New York.

"This important demonstration of EUV lithography’s potential to be used in semiconductor manufacturing in the coming years is encouraging to all of us in the industry that benefit from chip feature sizes shrinking over time," said Dr. Bruno La Fontaine of AMD. "Although there is still a lot of work to be done before the industry can use EUV lithography in high volume production, AMD has shown it can be integrated successfully in a semiconductor fabrication flow to produce the first layer of metal interconnects across a full chip."

The EUV lithography is touted as the next-generation production technique and has quite a history behind. Back in 1997, Intel, Motorola and AMD set the basis of the EUV Limited Liability Corporation to develop an extreme ultraviolet process to replace DUV at the 100-nanometer processing node.

"Collaborative research is essential to enabling advancements in semiconductor research," said David Medeiros, manager of Patterning Research for IBM in Albany, NY. "Our partnerships at the Albany facility are allowing for assessment of the various aspects of the EUV infrastructure in an integrated way, and will be the true test of this technology’s readiness for manufacturing."

The next step on the two companies' roadmap is to make the EUV lithography a viable production technique by perfecting and extending it not only to metal interconnects, but also to all critical layers of the microprocessor.