OPTION 1: Small-Business ERC Collaborative Opportunity for the Commercialization of an Extreme Ultraviolet source at 13 nm for EUV lithography tool inspection

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Overview:In this project, KMlabs will work with the currently active ERC in EUV Science and Technologyin an effort to optimize and commercialize a tabletop coherent extreme ultraviolet sourcebased on high-order harmonic generation (HHG), targeted specifically for 13.5 nm wavelength.The end goal of this project is to produce a commercial prototype that can produce efficient13.5 nm light to support EUV lithography tool development. Such a small-scale laser sourcecan be used for a variety of lithography support applications including optics characterization,metrology, and mask inspection, which can help to ensure the rapid deployment of this criticaltechnology, currently planned for ~2015.Intellectual Merit :CU-Boulder, as a part of the EUV ERC, has been developing coherent EUV technology for morethan a decade. Their recent work has led to a more comprehensive understanding of how to optimizethe HHG upconversion process to generate EUV or x-ray light at a particular target wavelength.This for the first time allows us to identify specific approaches that may allow for significant(up to 3 orders of magnitude) increases in coherent flux capability at 13 nm.KMlabs has proven track of record for successfully commercializing cutting edge scientificresults?for example the eXtreme Ultraviolet Ultrafast Source (XUUS), introduced in 2009. TheXUUS is a broadband coherent ultrafast EUV source optimized to generate 30 nm light, and 15XUUS setups have been delivered to research customers worldwide. Optimization of this sourcefor 13 nm will make it possible to address a much greater range of industry needs. We haveidentified three possible approaches for optimizing 13 nm flux. In this project we plan toperform a direct comparative evaluation of these approaches. Based on our physical understanding,we believe we can determine the global optimum for HHG conversion to 13 nm.Broader Impacts :KMlabs and the EUV ERC will each leverage their technical strengths, and this project willserve to leverage the impact of EUV ERC technology on the science and technology enterprise.The rapid advance of microelectronics technology, as described by Moore?s law, has been amajor driver of the global economy. This advance has been driven primarily by progress inlithography that allows for shrinking feature size. Current visible wavelength tools are strainingagainst fundamental limits, and the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors hasbeen anticipated a shift to EUV lithography for quite some time. The timeline for EUV hadrepeatedly experienced delays because the use of EUV light, which is strongly absorbed byall materials, is radically more difficult to work with than visible/UV.Nevertheless, recent progress in 13 nm EUV light sources for lithographic exposure has madeits adoption for the 22 nm node-size in the next generation computer chips a high priority.EUV lithography remains untested at the systems and large-scale production level, with manyunknowns. Improved capabilities for mask defect detection and characterization, for characterizingoptics degradation with long-term use, and for tasks such as alignment and quality control,can all benefit from a usable tabletop at-wavelength laser source. An HHG-based coherent 13nm EUV light source is a relatively low cost, small-scale, contamination-free coherent sourcesuitable for industrial application, and which has already been proven to enable new capabilitiessuch as coherent diffractive EUV imaging with near-wavelength resolution, and for materialscharacterization. KMlabs plans to build on this proposed work in future with development ofreflectometer/ellipsometer instruments, as well as an inspection microscope for EUV lithographyapplications.