The ending of optical lithography and the prospects of its successors

Highly Ordered Anodic Porous Alumina Formation by Self‐Organized Anodizing

“…Lithography techniques can be also employed for the preparation of nanoporous membranes and various templates used for the subsequent deposition of metals [38]. The fabrication of highordered nanostructures with the periodicity less than 50 nm is beyond what a conventional optical lithography could afford [39,40]. Advanced non-optic lithographic techniques, such as electron-beam [41][42][43][44][45], ion-beam [46,47], X-ray [48], interference or holographic lithographies [49][50][51], can replicate patterns with a sufficient resolution of few nanometers, but required sophisticated facilities.…”

E-beam direct write is free

“…If the selling price of the integrated circuit is p, then RD/p good chips must be sold. Let Y be the total yield, a be the area of the chips, and let's approximate the useable area on a 300 mm wafer as 700 cm 2 . In this case, the number of wafers needed for a design to be economically feasible is aRD/700pY, where a is measured in sq cm.…”

“…Despite the fact that EbDW has been a "technology of the future" for 40 years-it was mentioned as such in Gordon Moore's first paper 1 on Moore's Law-the challenges and costs of multi-exposure optical and EUV lithography have given new impetus to EbDW efforts 2 . E-Beam Direct Write has a long history in the development of semiconductor research and manufacturing.…”

The role of MEMS in maskless lithography

“…The advantages of maskless lithography are obvious: lower costs, particularly for small series [6], and faster prototyping because the delaying step of maskmaking disappears. The challenges, however, are enormous.…”