Status of EUV Lithography Anthony Ten, TSMC
Last year TSMC gave a very pessimistic assessment of EUV, this year the news was much better.
Last year at this time TSMC was only seeing about 10 watts of source power at intermediate focus, this year it is up to 90 watts. This represents the first time EUV has actually hit a source power milestone, in fact it is slightly ahead of where they thought they would be. The forward forecast is for 125 watts late Q2 and 250 watts late Q4. Both of these forecast goals will require the second generation light source.
Average tool availability is still only running 55%. Over an 8 week period with a 40 watt source TSMC ran 203 wafers/day for a total of 11,375 wafers (current ArFi tools can run >200 wafers per hour). After the 80 watt upgrade TSMC ran 1,022 wafers in a single day. These numbers are a huge improvement from last year although they still need to double for production. The tin droplet generator has to be replaced approximately every 4 days and it takes most of a day. ASML is working on an improved droplet generator. The droplet generator has to run at an amazing 50,000 droplets per second!
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In summary, excellent progress has been made this year but there is still a lot of work to be done before EUV is ready for high volume manufacturing. Assuming everything stays on track we could see readiness in 2016, possibly for a late 10nm node insertion. The question will then become how does EUV match up versus multi patterning solutions on a layer by layer basis.
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