Big news came to Hillsboro, Oregon, last week as Intel brought in one of the most sophisticated pieces of equipment in the world. Want to see what a piece of equipment this expensive that can fit on the back of a flat bed looks like? Well, watch it roll into the Ronler Acres Fab! This is one of 10 the company intends to buy, and the first one is now installed here. No wonder there is so much excitement and such a rush to grow the company’s footprint here in Oregon. This is yet another indicator that Hillsboro will be the tech giant in the NW for semiconductor production and development.
More from Intel and ASML below.
#Intel Oregon welcomes the delivery of a key component of #ASML’s first TWINSCAN EXE:5200 system – an extreme ultraviolet (#EUV) high-volume production system with a 0.55 numerical aperture – as part of the two companies’ long-term High NA collaboration framework.
From ASML Press Release:
Today, ASML Holding N.V. (ASML) and Intel Corporation (INTC) announced the latest phase of their longstanding collaboration to advance the cutting edge of semiconductor lithography technology. Intel has issued its first purchase order to ASML for the delivery of the industry’s first TWINSCAN EXE:5200 system – an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) high-volume production system with a high numerical aperture and more than 200 wafers per hour productivity – as part of the two companies’ long-term High-NA collaboration framework.
“Intel’s vision and early commitment to ASML’s High-NA EUV technology is proof of its relentless pursuit of Moore’s Law. Compared to the current EUV systems, our innovative extended EUV roadmap delivers continued lithographic improvements at reduced complexity, cost, cycle time and energy that the chip industry needs to drive affordable scaling well into the next decade,” said ASML President and CTO Martin van den Brink
Intel announced at its Accelerated event in July that it plans to deploy the first High-NA technology to enable its roadmap of transistor innovations. Intel was the first to purchase the earlier TWINSCAN EXE:5000 system in 2018, and with the new purchase announced today, the collaboration continues the path for Intel’s production manufacturing with High-NA EUV beginning in 2025.
“Intel’s focus is to stay at the forefront of semiconductor lithography technology and we’ve been building our EUV expertise and capacity over the last year. Working closely with ASML, we will harness High-NA EUV’s high-resolution patterning as one of the ways we continue Moore’s Law and maintain our strong history of progression down to the smallest of geometries,” said Dr. Ann Kelleher, executive vice president and general manager of Technology Development at Intel.
The EXE platform is an evolutionary step in EUV technology and includes a novel optics design and significantly faster reticle and wafer stages. The TWINSCAN EXE:5000 and EXE:5200 systems offer a 0.55 numerical aperture — a precision increase from previous EUV machines with a 0.33 numerical aperture lens — to enable higher-resolution patterning for even smaller transistor features. The numerical aperture of the system, combined with the wavelength used, determines the smallest printable feature.
EUV 0.55 NA has been designed to enable multiple future nodes beginning in 2025 as the industry’s first deployment, followed by memory technologies at similar density. At the 2021 Investor Day, ASML shared its EUV roadmap and indicated that High-NA technology is expected to start supporting production manufacturing in 2025. Today’s announcement is consistent with this roadmap.
This AMSL press release has got to be meant as a joke. If not, it is the worst press release I have ever read. If meant to be informative then it must be intended for an audience of super tech nerds and certainly not for the typical citizen of Hillsboro. I understood none of it. Perhaps Intel can write its own press release that most of us could understand. If they can’t, it doesn’t bode well for Intel! It would have also been nice if they had told us what ASML stands for. Good Grief.
Yes, most PR are meant to drum up new business from competitors of Intel. Given the expense of these machines, AMSL’s goal is to drive more sales faster. Unfortunately, these are not meant for laymen and even many high tech individuals might not fully understand the capabilities of this equipment given the complexity and very niche user base. Many inside Intel will not know all of it but their process engineering team will (not their IC designers).
To simply put it, as the geometries printed on a wafer get smaller and smaller, the optics and design database manipulations required to print the same geometry as laid out by the physical design team is quite complex (PhD in many fields). Long ago, they used light wavelengths of 193nm but this had to be replaced as process scaling kept getting smaller and smaller (resulting more more design chips with 2x transistor density for each generation. With the latest new processes, they are targeting 13.5nm wavelengths.
You can see some of the complexity in this paper including the optics required to redirect the light down to the wafer….
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/materials-science/extreme-ultraviolet-lithography#:~:text=EUV%20radiation%20covers%20the%20wavelength,range%20of%2011%E2%80%9314%20nm.