Yet unlike software, where industry leadership can shift in a matter of months, success in lithography is a slow-moving race ...

The first pulse flattens them. The second one obliterates them into a plasma that emits the EUV light. That light is then collected using the smoothest mirrors ever invented and directed toward ...

That has improved, but power efficiency remains a major issue.” Much of this is due to the fact that EUV scanners contain 6 mirrors. “The more mirrors in the optical path, the more energy is lost,” ...

Even with these coatings, each mirror can only reflect a theoretical maximum of 72% of the incident EUV light — the rest is absorbed by the mirror. To get close to this theoretical level and to ...

The most significant of these are the efficiency of the EUV production, the reflectivity of mirrors and the continuous, high-repetition rate operation of lithography systems. The best tin-based ...

In a lithography tool such as ASML’s, the EUV beam bounces off nearly a dozen mirrors before it hits the silicon. EUV light is so easily absorbed, though, that even in a vacuum-sealed chamber ...