Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is leading a newly established center to research and develop extreme ultraviolet lithography technology to enable large-scale production of advanced semiconductor chips.
The Center for High Precision Patterning Science secured funding from the Department of Energy to research new EUV lithography materials and evaluate their interaction with EUV light, Berkeley Lab reported Monday.
The CHiPPS Energy Frontier Research Center focuses on four research areas: photomaterials synthesis, new materials for “hierarchical” self-assembly, theory and modeling and new methods to characterize EUV lithography materials with atomic precision.
Berkeley Lab CHiPPS Director Ricardo Ruiz said the center aims to create a fundamental understanding and control of patterning processes for large-scale manufacturing of future-generation microelectronics.
“EUV lithography is key to creating integrated-circuit patterns on the scale of a billionth of a meter in the materials that are used to manufacture advanced microchips. It’s the latest advance in lithography, a technique that uses light to print tiny patterns in silicon to mass produce microchips,” Ruiz explained.
The CHiPPS team includes scientists from the Molecular Foundry, the Advanced Light Source, the Center for X-Ray Optics, the Chemical Sciences Division and the Energy Storage & Distributed Resources Division.
Argonne National Laboratory, San Jose State University, Stanford University, the University of California at Santa Barbara and Cornell University also provide support to the center.
