How Carl Zeiss Crafts Optics for a $150 Million EUV Machine

Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography is the next step on the semiconductor fabrication roadmap. It is a disruptive technology using a new ultraviolet wavelength.

Dutch company ASML is currently the only company shipping these million dollar machines. But ASML in turn relies on Carl Zeiss in Germany for the all-important optics system. The two are intimate strategic partners.

The key issue that ASML and Carl Zeiss engineers had to overcome is that high-energy UV light gets absorbed by virtually all materials, which means that lenses are not feasible. The lens material will literally just eat up those rays. Thus, Zeiss crafted an optics system entirely out of multi-layer mirrors.

It is super cool. In my last video I gave a brief overview of Carl Zeiss the company and a few of their products. In this follow up, we are going to go deeper and look at how Zeiss made a EUV optics system.

Errata: (You can tell I was getting tired.)

5:30 - I suck at math. 17,622 meters high, not 780 meters
11:00 - The mirror is coated last. Multi-layer deposition goes first
11:30 - 0.5mm

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