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Moore's Law Continues
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mawyatt:
MIT Lincoln Labs with USG sponsorship were doing nanometer level Direct Write E-Beam Lithography over 20 years ago. They created a special Class 1 Area within a Class 10 Room for E-Beam processing the special wafers, which was painfully slow!! To help with the throughput, conventional lithography was used for non-critical areas of the chip, while Direct Write utilized where meaningful. This helped with overall wafer processing speed, but still much too slow (expensive) for commercial use, and thus relegated to specialized chip development where actual chip cost didn't matter, but performance and chip size did!!

Direct Write can achieve remarkable resolutions but is hampered by throughput speed since it's basically a serial write process, whereas UV and EUV are essentially parallel exposure lithography processes, and thus much more economical, altho as mentioned the mask costs are far from economical!!!

Best,
mawyatt:

--- Quote from: magic on October 31, 2023, 05:14:39 am ---The optics required to cover 16×26mm field in a single exposure at 10nm resolution must be insane. It's like APS-C with more than million pixels in each dimension, and of course tack sharp from corner to corner.


--- Quote ---Consequently, at the mask, the incoming and outgoing cones of light become larger and must be angled away from each other to avoid overlapping. Overlapping cones of light produce an asymmetric diffraction pattern, resulting in unpleasant imaging effects.
--- End quote ---
Do you know something about this effect and what it means for photograhpy?


--- End quote ---

The optics are by Carl Zeiss, and likely the most advanced optics ever conceived and well beyond our limited understanding. These folks at ASML and Zeiss have been doing what was thought quite impossible for some time now, and continue to do so in spite of what physics indicates are the limits.

Quite impressive indeed  :clap:

And this is what they are releasing, you can wager they are well beyond what's indicated in this article ;)

Edit: As you mentioned the optics to achieve those resolutions over a 16X26mm field are quite insane!! One of our most prized optics is the famous Printing Nikkor 105mm F2.8, this was created and used to copy high resolution movie film over the standard 35mm frame, but at resolutions that could be acceptable for movie theater use, so use as film reproduction. Nikon spend years developing this lens for this use, and thus the Printing Nikkor name. The Carl Zeiss lenses are doing something similar but at nanometer resolutions over a similar size field!!

https://www.savazzi.net/photography/printing-nikkor-105mm.html

https://www.closeuphotography.com/lens-tests

Guess where the idea of using processed silicon wafers for lens evaluation across the field came from  ;D

Best,
ejeffrey:

--- Quote from: coppice on October 31, 2023, 11:08:55 am ---
--- Quote from: TimFox on October 30, 2023, 09:27:34 pm ---When I was still in grad school, there was a lot of interest in charged-particle beams (electrons or ions) for high-resolution lithography, since the diffraction limit was much better than for photons.
Instead of physical masks, they would use beam deflection, as in a CRT, to expose the pattern on a resist layer, or deposit metal ions directly.
(There are lots of other practical problems with charged-particle optics, especially aberrations, but electron microscopes had achieved spatial resolution better than 1 nm more than 50 years ago.)
The shorter and shorter wavelength UV clearly won out since then, but I wonder when massive particles will re-appear?

--- End quote ---
There used to be e-beam lithography machines at around the 1 micron level, used for rapid prototyping. I don't think they were ever considered for mass production, because they take too long to scan. However, for prototyping skipping the slow and costly mask creation step is a huge plus point. Now masks costs have risen to eye watering levels, so you'd think that skipping them would be an even better deal for prototyping now than 35 years ago. I understand they can make the e-beam machines work down to the resolution of current ICs - 1 or 2nm.

--- End quote ---

Well, you can make masks with e-beam writers although laser scanners are more common, so the costs aren't independent.  The issue is that as you move to smaller feature sizes the e-beam writing process also gets slower and more expensive, so it's not clear that the tradeoff point actually changes.
Someone:

--- Quote from: TimFox on October 31, 2023, 04:11:20 pm ---
--- Quote from: Someone on October 31, 2023, 06:39:35 am ---
--- Quote from: TimFox on October 30, 2023, 09:27:34 pm ---There are lots of other practical problems with charged-particle optics, especially aberrations, but electron microscopes had achieved spatial resolution better than 1 nm more than 50 years ago.
--- End quote ---
Imaging resolution /= machining resolution. 10nm feature size is pretty tough on a FIB and as above, veeeeerrrryyyyy sssssllllllooooowwwwwwwwww.
--- End quote ---
< 1 nm resolution was obtained in scanning transmission electron microscopes (STEM) around 1970, which is a similar problem to machining resolution.
--- End quote ---
Restating what you already said doesnt add much if anything. You might think they are similar, but care to share references to single digit nm machining ? Like with lithography the actual resolution achievable is variable depending on the design geometry and not able to be summed up as a single readily comparable number.
TimFox:

--- Quote from: Someone on October 31, 2023, 10:53:37 pm ---
--- Quote from: TimFox on October 31, 2023, 04:11:20 pm ---
--- Quote from: Someone on October 31, 2023, 06:39:35 am ---
--- Quote from: TimFox on October 30, 2023, 09:27:34 pm ---There are lots of other practical problems with charged-particle optics, especially aberrations, but electron microscopes had achieved spatial resolution better than 1 nm more than 50 years ago.
--- End quote ---
Imaging resolution /= machining resolution. 10nm feature size is pretty tough on a FIB and as above, veeeeerrrryyyyy sssssllllllooooowwwwwwwwww.
--- End quote ---
< 1 nm resolution was obtained in scanning transmission electron microscopes (STEM) around 1970, which is a similar problem to machining resolution.
--- End quote ---
Restating what you already said doesnt add much if anything. You might think they are similar, but care to share references to single digit nm machining ? Like with lithography the actual resolution achievable is variable depending on the design geometry and not able to be summed up as a single readily comparable number.

--- End quote ---

Don't be a jerk.  I was clarifying my earlier statement.  I was near the lab that achieved that resolution with an STEM, but I am unfamiliar with nm machining.
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