Pat Gelsinger wants to save Moore’s Law with new lasers

Since Pat Gelsinger was involuntarily sent into retirement at Intel a year ago, he has been working at the investment company Playground Global. One of the investment objects: The US startup xLight. The name already suggests what it's about: external light for chip factories. The basic idea is not to build the light source for exposure machines in semiconductor manufacturing into each device, as the lithography market leader ASML does.

As Gelsinger now said at a TechCrunch event, the huge xLight machines are to be located outside the cleanroom buildings of typical chip factories. The light sources are to be around 100 by 50 meters in size, about as much as a smaller football field. As already reported, free-electron lasers (FELs) are to generate light with extremely short wavelengths. Their beams are more tightly focused and scatter less – this could be suitable for transmission over longer distances. It is still about wavelengths in the EUV spectrum (extreme ultra violet) that is already in use today.

Laser light at 2 nanometers

Only much smaller than with previous EUV sources: According to the report, ASML achieves 13.5 nanometers, while xLight aims for 2 nanometers. The nanometer figures for the structure widths of the most modern chip manufacturers like TSMC, which are primarily driven by marketing, are significantly below the wavelengths of the exposure machines, because refraction and mask structure play a role, among other things.

"We believe this technology will reawaken Mooreֹ’s Law," said Pat Gelsinger, according to TechCrunch. The observation, which has been valid in the chip industry for decades and is actually purely statistical, by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore states that the number of integrated elements on a semiconductor can be doubled approximately every two years. However, in the last ten years, Moore's Law has increasingly stalled, partly because basic technologies such as EUV lithography were only slowly established.

The idea of FEL light sources for lithography is not entirely new, but according to the report, xLight CEO Nicholas Kelez now considers it ready for mass production. According to him, the industry has agreed on EUV sources in the exposure machines because tens of billions had already flowed into development by the time the technology was introduced. "We treat light just like electricity or HVAC systems. We produce (light) outside the factory on the scale of a power plant and then distribute it to the systems within the plant," said Kelez.

The schedule for this is ambitious. The first wafers exposed with xLight are expected to be produced as early as 2028, and the system is expected to be ready for mass production in 2029. For the development to market readiness, xLight received a commitment last week from the US Department of Commerce for funding of 150 million US dollars within the framework of the "Chips and Science Act".

(nie)