As the most critical equipment in the chip production process, the lithography machine has a very high technical barrier, known as "the pearl in the crown of the semiconductor industry", which represents the wisdom crystallization of human civilization.
In such a race against time as chips, time is money.
According to ASML officials, ASML has also been pursuing the extreme speed of lithography machines. At present, the state-of-the-art DUV lithography machine can produce 300 wafers per hour.
What kind of concept is this?
Let's convert it to find that it takes only 12 seconds to complete an entire wafer, which deducts the wafer exchange and positioning time, and the actual lithography time is even shorter.
The lithography process of a wafer requires nearly 100 different positions on the wafer to image circuit patterns, so the exposure imaging of one image unit (Field) is about 0.1s.
To achieve this imaging speed, the wafer platform is moving at a high speed with an acceleration of up to 7g. What is the concept of 7g acceleration? The acceleration of the F1 car from 0 to 100km/h takes about 2.5 seconds, while the acceleration of 7g on the wafer platform takes about 0.4 seconds to accelerate from 0 to 100km/h.
DUV is deep ultraviolet (Deep Ultraviolet Lithography) and EUV is very deep ultraviolet (Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography).
From the perspective of process technology, DUV can only be used to produce 7nm and above process chips. Only EUV can meet the requirements of 7nm wafer manufacturing, and it can continue to extend to 5nm and 3nm.