Extreme ultraviolet lithography development in the United States

The extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) development effort in the United States, at universities, national laboratories, and semiconductor consortia, is focused on solving critical infrastructure issues in the mask, mask handling, source, optics, and resist areas. The current maturity of EUVL infrastructure will likely be sufficient to support the first full-field EUVL exposure tools that have been delivered in 2006. However, a significant effort is still required to make the EUVL infrastructure ready for EUVL manufacturing insertion later this decade. This paper reviews the current status of EUVL infrastructure development in the United States and reports recent progress in EUV mask blank development, EUV source collector and projection optics lifetime, and the evaluation of EUV resist performance. © 2007 The Japan Society of Applied Physics.