American startup Substrate is developing a new X-ray lithography (XRL) system, powered by a particle accelerator-based light source, that promises superior performance and cost efficiency compared to standard EUV lithography, aiming to achieve resolutions equivalent to ASML's 2nm-class processes. The firm also claims it can advance beyond that. Substrate also claims that its efforts will be cheaper to produce than the competition's and will offer finer resolutions before 2030, as the company detailed on its website.
However, the tool that Substrate is developing does not appear to be compatible with existing equipment and production flows, so the company will have to reinvent the whole supply chain to be successful. However, Substrate does not plan to sell its tool, but to build its own fab and provide foundry services.
As integrated circuit features are getting smaller, chipmakers are using increasingly intricate lithography tools that now cost around $235 million for an ASML NXE:3800E Low-NA EUV scanner or around $380 million for an ASML EXE:5200B High-NA EUV scanner. As a result, fabs are becoming increasingly expensive to build, and chips are becoming more expensive to produce.
Substrate models that a leading-edge fab will cost around $50 billion by 2030, leaving semiconductor production to a handful of companies with very deep pockets. Furthermore, such fab expenditures are expected to increase the cost of a 300-mm wafer, which it claims could balloon to $100,000 when using leading-edge fabrication processes. This will make the development and production of advanced chips prohibitively expensive for small companies. Substrate intends to change that and reduce wafer pricing to just $10,000 by 2030.
"At Substrate, we have a pathway to reduce the cost of leading-edge silicon by an order of magnitude compared to the current cost-scaling path we are on," a statement by the company reads. "By the end of the decade, Substrate will produce wafers closer to $10,000, not $100,000."
Note that Substrate is by no means the only company exploring particle accelerators as light sources for EUV or beyond-EUV lithography. In the U.S. alone, two companies — Inversion Semiconductor and xLight — as well as researchers at Johns Hopkins University, have revealed that they are working on lithography systems harnessing particle accelerators over the past 12 months. Chinese scientists and Japanese researchers are also testing particle accelerators for semiconductor production.
Substrate's X-ray lithography
Substrate is developing a new type of lithography system that uses a particle accelerator to produce short-wavelength X-ray radiation (or light) for chipmaking. The goal is to replace ASML's expensive EUV lithography scanners with compact, low-cost machines capable of printing transistor patterns at a 2nm-class process technology (or even more advanced, the company claims). The firm claims the machine should reduce chip production costs by 10 times by the end of the decade.
(Image credit: CERN)
At the core of Substrate’s technology is a custom particle accelerator which propels electrons (produced by an unknown emitter) to near the speed of light using radio-frequency cavities. As these electrons pass through sporadic magnetic fields, they gain kinetic energy, accelerating to speeds very close to the speed of light (a relativistic speed), which allows them to produce special types of light when manipulated. These fast-moving electrons fly through a series of magnets that flip back and forth, wiggling the electrons and causing them to release their energy and produce coherent bursts of intense X-ray light (or radiation).
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