UCF make Extreme Ultraviolet light source 30 times brighter to enable 12 nanometer lithography

Tweet The team, led by Martin Richardson, university trustee chair and University of Central Florida (UCF)'s Northrop Grumman professor of X-Ray optics, successfully demonstrated for the first time an EUV light source with 30 times the power of previous recorded attempts – enough to power the stepper machines used to reproduce detailed circuitry images onto computer chips.

"We must use a light source with a wavelength short enough to allow the minimum feature size on a chip to go down to possibly as low as 12 nanometers," Richardson said. The current industry standard for semiconductor production is approximately 65 nanometers. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter; a sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick.

This means that the normal semiconductor business and Moore's law should have a clear technical path to 12 nanometers. Even better and cheaper technology could still come up, but it is difficult to displace the proven processes.

The semiconductor roadmap 2005, 2006 will be out Dec, 2006

The roadmap projects about 10 nanometer structures in 2015

CNET has an article about the projected semiconductor manufacturing process nodes, 32 nanometers, 22 nanometers and the challenges of achieving them

Wikipedia info on semiconductors

A series of CNET articles about extending Moore's law with other technology