With few tools in development for the EUV mask infrastructure, Sematech has said it will convene a meeting during SEMICON West to garner financial support from companies and government sources. The goal is to entice commercial suppliers to develop EUV mask blank inspection, mask defect review, and mask pattern inspection tools.

In a possible breakthrough, chip giant Intel claims that it has pushed 193nm immersion lithography down to 15nm—at least in the lab.

At the SPIE Advanced Lithography conference last year, AMD's Bruno La Fontaine revealed the IBM Alliance's Typhoon, a 45nm full-field test chip using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography at the first metal level. With that project finished the middle of last year, the alliance — including IBM, AMD, Toshiba and other partners — decided to kick it up a notch. "We were going to move on to 32nm, but technology is moving so fast, if we spent our time on that, we would never get to 16nm, which is where EUV will be used..."

At Nikon's annual LithoVision symposium yesterday on the eve of the SPIE Advanced Lithography conference in San Jose, representatives from throughout the lithography community, as well as Nikon representatives, gave updates on progress being made in immersion lithography, double patterning and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. Although they had much to tell on the technology advances, a common theme was the consternation at not yet having what appears to be a workable solution beyond 20nm.

In light of recent advances, Kool said, ASML has concluded that EUV is the most likely successor to 193nm imaging. Accordingly, the company is investing in manufacturing space and developing a production exposure platform...