Nanoimprint Lithography Aims to Take on EUV
5th January 2025
In September, Canon shipped the first commercial version of a technology that could one day upend the making of the most advanced silicon chips. Called nanoimprint lithography (NIL), it’s capable of patterning circuit features as small as 14 nanometers—enabling logic chips on par with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia processors now in mass production.
The NIL system offers advantages that may challenge the US $150 million machines that dominate today’s advanced chipmaking today, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography scanners. If Canon is correct, its machines will eventually deliver EUV-quality chips at a fraction of the cost.
The company’s approach is entirely different to EUV systems, which are made exclusively by Netherlands-based ASML. The Dutch company uses a complex process that starts with kilowatt-class lasers to blasting molten droplets of tin into a plasma that glows with a 13.5 nanometer wavelength. This light is then steered through a vacuum chamber by specialized optics and bounced off a patterned mask onto a silicon wafer to fix the pattern onto the wafer.
In contrast, Canon’s system, which was shipped to Defense Department-backed R&D consortium the Texas Institute for Electronics, seems almost comically simple. Put simply, it stamps the circuit pattern onto the wafer.