Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin have built a table-top Extreme Ultraviolet lithography device and paired it with a new 3D printing technique that reduces semiconductor nanostructure processing time from days to minutes, according to a study published in Nano Letters.
Standard EUV lithography machines cost more than $200 million and occupy an entire room, putting commercial semiconductor manufacturing out of reach for most research institutions. The Cockrell School team stripped the traditional printer down to its basic components, producing a modular, less expensive system that sits on a table. It’s a meaningful shift for academic researchers who can’t access industrial-scale equipment.
The technique, called volumetric 3D patterning, solves a persistent bottleneck. Commercial EUV lithography can only print 3D nanostructures in 2D steps, one layer at a time. The new approach prints multiple layers simultaneously. “The actual printing might not take very long,” said Chih-Hao Chang, a professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and one of the lead authors on the paper. “But the processing can take days.”
The research is funded through the National Science Foundation’s Future of Semiconductors (FuSe2) program, which targets cost reduction in semiconductor research. The Cockrell team has already tested an EUV material developed by partners at UT Dallas and Johns Hopkins University, with more tests planned.
Right now, the system can only pattern periodic structures, making it most useful for memory chips and photonics. The longer-term goal is faster printers capable of producing more complex features for smaller transistor switches, giving individual chips greater computing power. “Beyond semiconductor manufacturing, the ability to pattern 3D nanostructures can find applications in medicine for nanodrugs, quantum computing or synthesizing novel materials,” said Saurav Mohanty, a recent Ph.D. graduate and the study’s first author.
Source: cockrell.utexas.edu
