Researchers Claim Photoresist Advance

Backed by funding from Intel and the chemical maker JSR, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have created a new kind of photoresist they say will work with the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light required for the next generation of semiconductor manufacturing. A team led by Paul Ashby and Deirdre Olynick combined two kinds of resists—one cross-linking and one chemically amplified—to create a resist that forms smooth circuit lines with 13.5-nm EUV light, according to the researchers. Companies should be able to commercialize the resist by 2017, they add.