Most light that patterns a modern chip never enters a scanner. It comes from a four-tonne excimer laser in the subfab, and Gigaphoton has built those units for 26 years.
At SEMICON West the Komatsu subsidiary argued the wavelength can do more than expose resist. Chief executive Tatsuo Enami said shorter wavelengths can be used everywhere, and the company is chasing four problems beyond lithography.
Drilling vias into packaging film
Chiplet packages need interconnects of five to ten microns at the die edge on the same panel as power vias of 80 to 100 microns. A CO2 laser bottoms out near 30 microns, and a 355nm tool reaches about ten.
Gigaphoton’s answer is the G300K, a 248nm krypton fluoride laser delivering 300W at up to 4 kHz. It fires through a mask and images the pattern onto build-up film, so every via in the field forms at once. One exposure has cut eight diameters between three and ten microns, with sidewalls near 87.6 degrees and no damage to the copper beneath.
About ten lasers have shipped to equipment suppliers. Volume adoption is years out.
A tin source the size of a table
The same 13.5nm physics behind EUV lithography serves mask inspection from a source roughly three metres square. At 20 kHz it has run over 5,500 hours continuously at 90 percent availability.
The fifth direction is gas. Laser mixtures are about 95 percent neon, and prices jumped roughly 20-fold after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Gigaphoton now has 40 recycling units attached to 220 lasers, avoiding about 18 million liters a year, and extended the approach to argon fluoride lasers in September.
Recycling gas is a boring business until a fab loses a shift to a supply chain three borders away.
