A powerful light source bigger than a London double-decker bus has set a record: it can create structures on a silicon wafer that are just 8 nanometres (nm) wide. Those are thought to be the smallest ever made in a single step by a commericial chip-patterning system. According to the system’s manufacturer, it could be used to make computer chips patterned with 2.9 times more transistors than chips produced with the previous generation of the light sources used for this purpose.
The device projects extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light through a patterned ‘mask’ onto the surfaces of silicon wafers coated with light-sensitive chemicals. In response to the light, the chemicals harden in the same pattern. The wafer is then chemically etched, and the process repeated, to produce all of the electric components of the chip, including tiny switches called transistors and the extremely fine wiring that connects them.
This process, called EUV lithography, is not new. But the record-setting model has extra-powerful optics that can make smaller transistors. Cramming ever-more and tinier transistors into a chip of a given area enables progress in computing. Chips with more transistors could also help artificial-intelligence data centres to run more computations without using more electricity.
The unprecedented system was described at the SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning conference in San Jose, California, in February1. The advances were presented by a representative of the system’s manufacturer, ASML, which is headquartered in Veldhoven, the Netherlands.
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