Our digital age is being influenced by significant trends such as artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, virtual and augmented reality, and cloud services. With almost 40 billion connected devices world-wide, distributed computation and data storage will become increasingly important. To meet this growing demand, the energy, cost and time of electronic computations needs to be reduced by shrinking the size of transistors on microchips. This is where powerful EUV photolithography systems come into play. These systems operate at wavelengths as short as 13.5 nm, enabling the creation of 3-dimensional integrated circuits on the few-nanometer scale.

A major bottleneck for process optimization with extreme accuracy and speed is lack of precise and fast metrology tools inspecting chip quality during production. This is limiting large chip production throughput at high cost. Brilliant EUV sources based on laser-driven HHG enable inspection and metrology concepts being developed with the following key targets:

• Few-nanometer wavelength for matching the scale of integrated devices
• High brightness for fast measurements and high accuracy
• Broad spectral bandwidth for material contrast
• High spatial coherence for lens-less nano-imaging concepts, such as coherent diffractive imaging (CDI), ptychrography, or EUV tomography