Huawei Sets Off Industry Shock Waves, Laser Manufacturing To HelpDevelopment

On August 29, Huawei threw a heavy bomb - Huawei MATE 60 pro, less than an hour after the sale sold out. The reason why this new model on sale set off industry shock waves, mainly because when China's high-processby the West neck, directly let Huawei performance "shock", and this action may mean that Huawei solved the Problem. Talking about high-process chips, as the protagonist of the EUV lithography had to appear. The Netherlands Asmay's EUV lithography is currently the most advanced, which can manufacture 5nm high-end chips, while China's completely independent lithography only sighing 90nm process, the difference can be more than half a star. One of the core equipment of EUV lithography is the laser, and Germany's Trafigura is the only supplier of this key component to Asmac. Why is the laser so important? Because EUV lithography uses extreme ultraviolet light with a wavelength of 10-14nm as its light source. Here we need to understand what role the laser plays in the entire EUV lithography machine.
In the initial stage of the role of EUV lithography, the first generator will make the tin drops into the vacuum chamber, at this time from the fast pulsed high-power laser will output more than 30kW average pulse power of the laser beam, the peak pulse power can even reach several megawatts, so as to hit from the side of the drop of the tin drop, as many as 50,000 times per second. The tin atoms are ionized, creating a high-intensity plasma that emits EUV radiation at a wavelength of 13.5 nm in all directions. This is the very essence of EUV lithography, its "source". The process in which the starting light source strikes the tin liquid is actually divided into two steps, which involve two key pulses, which we call the pre-pulse and the main pulse. The so-called pre-pulse, as the name suggests, is the first to act on the liquid tin, mainly to shape it into the desired shape for the next step. And then the main pulse acts directly on it, which converts it into plasma. This is extremely demanding on the beam released by the laser, which must have the correct optical characteristics to ensure that the tin liquid can be treated correctly to produce the plasma and hence the EUV radiation. So will higher power lasers have more enhancements for generating EUV radiation, or can higher power lasers omit other technologies and make the overall technical requirements of future lithography more concise? In fact, early Chinese scientists have been related to the study.
In 2021, Tsinghua University Engineering Physics Professor Tang Chuanxiang's research group and the German research team completed a new particle gas pedal light source called "steady-state micro-beam" (SSMB) to verify the principle of the experiment. It is reported that the main use of laser wavelength of 1064 nanometers to manipulate the electron beam in the Berlin MLS storage ring, so that it around the ring a full circle (circumference of 48 meters), so as to form a fine micro-polymer beam. The microcluster beams radiate high-intensity narrow-bandwidth coherent light at the laser wavelength and its higher harmonics, and the experiments verified the formation of the microcluster beams by probing the radiation, thus demonstrating that the optical phases of the electrons can be correlated circle-by-circle with a precision shorter than the laser wavelength, which allows the electrons to be stably trapped in the optical potential wells formed by the laser, and thus verifying the mechanism of operation of the SSMB. This also implies that future SSMB-based EUV light sources are expected to achieve larger average power and potentially shorter wavelengths, which will have a great impact on the upgrading and application expansion of EUV lithography in the future.
The development of EUV lithography needs to be explored and accumulated, and it should only be a matter of time before new technologies can enhance theprocess of EUV lithography, reduce its energy consumption and break through its limits. Perhaps the future is not an iteration of EUV lithography, but the birth of new technologies to replace it. The power of lasers is endless, and I believe there are many more possibilities waiting to be discovered.