Texas Engineer Chih-Hao Chang in his lab with a student. Credit: The University of Texas at Austin
Faculty in the Cockrell School of Engineering have developed a rare printer as part of a larger project to speed up production and lower costs of manufacturing semiconductors critical to modern electronics.
Currently, manufacturing semiconductors has such a high entry cost that only a few companies in the world can do it at a commercial scale. Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography uses machines to "print" circuits onto a silicon substrate using a complex series of mirrors, tin, and a mask that then becomes the computer chips in phones, laptops, and other devices.
EUV lithography printers will usually run the average buyer more than $200 million and take up an entire room. Texas Engineers and their partners have created a tabletop EUV lithography device by stripping the traditional printer down to just basic components. This system is more versatile for researchers, more modular, and less expensive.
They've paired this new device with a printing technique called volumetric 3D patterning, which overcomes a key roadblock in existing processes. Commercial EUV lithography can only print 3D nanostructures in 2D steps, going layer by layer.
