Huawei has set off waves in the industry, and laser manufacturing has helped the development of chips

On August 29, Huawei threw a bombshell - Huawei MATE 60 pro, which was sold out in less than an hour. The reason why the opening of the new model set off waves in the industry, mainly because at the beginning, China's high process chip was blocked by Western countries, directly let Huawei's performance "shock", and this action may mean that Huawei has solved this problem.

When it comes to high process chips, EUV lithography, as the protagonist, has to appear. Dutch ASML's EUV lithography machine is the most advanced at present, and it can manufacture high-end chips at 5nm, while China's fully autonomous lithography machine only has a sighed 90nm process, which is more than a little bit worse. Among them, the laser is one of the most core equipment of EUV lithography, and TrumPF is the only supplier of this key component to ASML. Why are lasers important? Because the EUV lithography machine is the extreme ultraviolet light with a wavelength of 10-14nm as the light source, then how does this light come? Here we need to understand what role the laser plays in the entire EUV lithography machine.

In the initial phase of the EUV photomithography, the first generator will make the liquid tin continuously dripped into the vacuum chamber, at which time the pulsed high-power laser from TRUMPF will output more than 30kW average pulse power of the laser beam, the peak power of the pulse can even reach several megawatts, in order to hit the liquid tin dripping from the side, up to 50,000 times per second. The tin atoms are ionized, creating a high-intensity plasma that releases EUV radiation with a wavelength of 13.5 nm in all directions. And this is also the basis of EUV lithography machine, but also its "source".

In the process of the initial light source hitting the tin liquid, it is actually divided into two steps, and in the middle of this involves two key pulses, we call the pre-pulse and the main pulse. The so-called pre-pulse, as the name suggests, is the first action with the tin liquid, mainly to shape its shape, so that it becomes the shape required for the next step. And the main pulse directly acts on it, and it can be converted into plasma. This requires very high requirements for the beam released by the laser, and must have the correct optical characteristics to ensure that the tin liquid can be correctly processed to produce plasma, and there will be EUV radiation. So whether the higher power laser will have more improvement on the generation of EUV radiation, or whether the greater the power of the laser can omit other technologies, so that the overall technical requirements of the future lithography machine are more concise? In fact, Chinese scientists have already done relevant research.

In 2021, the research group of Tang Chuanxiang, a professor in the Department of Engineering Physics at Tsinghua University, and a research team in Germany completed a proof-of-principle experiment of a new particle accelerator light source called "Steady State Micro-bunching" (SSMB). It is reported that the main use of a wavelength of 1064 nanometers to manipulate the electron beam in the Berlin MLS storage ring, so that it is wrapped around the ring for a full circle (48 meters in circumference), so as to form a fine micro beam.

Micro-bundling will radiate high-intensity narrow bandwidth coherent light on the laser wavelength and its higher harmonics. The experiment verifies the formation of micro-bundling by detecting the radiation, thus proving that the optical phase of electrons can be correlated with a precision shorter than the laser wavelength, so that electrons can be steady-state bound in the optical potential well formed by the laser, thus verifying the working mechanism of SSMB. This also means that the future SSMB-based EUV light source is expected to achieve greater average power, and may reach a higher short wavelength, which has a huge impact on the future upgrade and application expansion of EUV lithography machines.

The development of EUV lithography requires us to continue to explore and accumulate, and it should only be a matter of time if new technologies can improve the chip process of EUV lithography, reduce its energy consumption, and break through its limits in the future. Perhaps the future is not the iteration of EUV lithography machine, but the birth of new technology to replace it. The power of the laser is endless, and I believe there will be more possibilities waiting for us to discover.

Source: OFweek