For the past 25 years, CXRO scientists and engineers have worked side by side with microelectronics industry leaders to tackle the significant technological advances required to develop EUV lithography. (Credit: Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab)
Advances in microelectronics - also known as microchips or chips - have enabled fast, powerful, compact smartphones and laptops - electronic devices that were once, long ago, the stuff of science fiction.
Chips consist of miniaturized components called transistors - tiny silicon switches that process and store data as ones and zeroes, the binary language of computers. The more transistors a chip has, the faster it can process data. The most sophisticated chip today is about the size of a fingernail and consists of more than 100 billion transistors.
Since the 1960s, the chip industry has relied on lithography - a technique that uses light to print tiny patterns on silicon to mass produce microchips. Through the decades, advances in lithography have enabled the use of smaller and smaller wavelengths and thus fabricate smaller transistors. During the early years of chip innovation, lithography tools once used visible light, with wavelengths as small as 400 nanometers (nm), and then ultraviolet light (as small as 248 nm) and deep ultraviolet light (193 nm).
Did You Know?
Advancing microelectronics is a strategic R&D direction for Berkeley Lab, and the CXRO's activities over the last 25 years are a major component to that.
In addition to collaborating with the semiconducting industry to extend Moore's Law, CXRO researchers are also helping other Berkeley Lab scientists develop next-generation chips that are also more energy efficient than conventional silicon chips.
