Present and future of 193 nm lithography

Currently 193 nm lithography is becoming the workhorse for state of the art IC technologies. To get there a lot of challenges had to be dealt with like defect density, line edge roughness, crystal growth on photo masks and others, of which some are closely connected to the new wavelength. Also from a manufacturing standpoint some progress had to be achieved. These different aspects of today’s 193 nm lithography will be discussed.After the demise of 157 nm lithography and the birth of immersion lithography near term there is no new wavelength visible and 193 nm lithography will be with us for the coming years and has to support the shrink roadmap of the IC industry for quite some time. Though by name dealing with the same technology a lot of new process options need to be introduced down the road like polarization and immersion itself with its challenges in process and hardware. An outlook will be given of what lies ahead of us.