EUV microelectronic device fabricated by Sandia

17 Jun 2002

The world's first working microelectronic device to be made with extreme ultraviolet light has been fabricated at Sandia National Laboratories. The device is a field effect transistor, a common building block of all integrated circuits. It has an electrical channel, or gate width less than 0.13 microns -- a thousandth the width of a human hair. Current leading edge chip patterns are printed with a photographic-like process, optical lithography, creating features that are 0.35 micron wide. However, optical lithography is reaching physical limits. "This demonstrates there are no fundamental show-stoppers in fabricating devices using extreme ultraviolet lithography," said Richard Stulen, who manages Sandia's Advanced Electronics Manufacturing Technologies Department in which the work takes place. "It's the world's first proof of principle for device fabrication with EUVL." The results were reported this week at a Boston meeting of the Optical Society of America.