A norvég Lace Lithography startup, backed by Microsoft, raised $40 million in its first funding round to develop a lithographic scanner that uses a beam of helium atoms for processing silicon wafers. The company claims that its technology will enable the production of chip elements that are ten times smaller than existing lithography systems, with a beam width of just 0.1 nm—ASML's EUV scanners use radiation with a wavelength of 13.5 nm.
The advantage of the Lace system is that atoms do not have a diffraction limit, whereas photon lithography, including EUV systems from ASML, is constrained by the wavelength of the light used. As chip manufacturers reduce the sizes of elements, they rely on increasingly complex multilayer patterning methods to circumvent this limitation, but Lace employs a different approach, replacing photons with neutral helium atoms and a beam width approximately equal to that of a single hydrogen atom.
Lace describes its systems as BEUV, or Beyond-EUV. The CEO and co-founder of Lace, Bodil Holst, stated that the technology developed by the company will allow chip manufacturers to print wafers with 'ultimately atomic resolution.' Imec's chief lithography scientist John Petersen believes that this approach could reduce transistors and other elements by an order of magnitude to an 'almost unimaginable' degree.
Lace has joined the growing number of startups developing alternatives to ASML's advanced lithography. American companies Substrate and xLight are developing light sources based on particle accelerators for EUV or X-ray lithography, with xLight having secured $150 million in U.S. government funding. Canon delivered its first tool for nanoimprint lithography to the Texas Institute of Electronics back in September 2024, while the Chinese company Prinano recently introduced its own nanoimprint lithography system to the domestic market.
A Lace megközelítése azonban eltér minden más cégtől. Míg a Substrate és az xLight továbbra is fotonokat használnak, a Lace teljesen elutasítja az elektromágneses sugárzást. Bár a Lace már létrehozta a rendszer prototípusait, a labor és a gyártás közötti szakadék, mint mindig, hatalmas. Jelenleg a cég egy pilótaüzem tesztstandjának kiépítését tervezi 2029-ig, és a sorozatgyártásra való áttérés határideje egyelőre nem ismert.
Fontos megjegyezni, hogy az ASML évtizedeket és milliárdokat költött az EUV-litográfiai kutatási koncepció kereskedelmi termékké alakítására. A Lace-nél jelenleg több mint 50 ember dolgozik Norvégiában, Spanyolországban, az Egyesült Királyságban és Hollandiában, és a cég először a SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning 2026 konferencián mutatta be kutatásai első eredményeit.
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Forrás: 3dnews.ru
