next generation of computer chips

  A research team at the University of Central Florida has been very successful in developing extreme ultraviolet light (EUV) as a way to power the manufacturing of the next generation of computer chips. Team leader Martin Richardson, university trustee chair and UCF's Northrop Grumman professor of X-ray optics, showed off an EUV light source that was 30 times as powerful as any previous attempt, adequate for supplying power to the stepper machine used to reproduce intricate circuitry images onto computer chips. Currently, chips are built using longer-wavelength UV light sources, but Richardson 's successful use of EUV light is a landmark achievement in the industry-wide effort to find the most economical power source for creating the computer chips of the future. Richardson collaborated with Powerlase, a UK-based company, who provided him with an incredibly strong Powerlase laser to use in conjunction with the specialized laser plasma source technology that his team has developed. The combination eliminates the neutral and charged particles associated with existing EUV plasma sources, which can harm the expensive optics of EUV steppers if they are allowed to stream freely away from the source. In order to keep up with Moore 's law, Richardson says considerable changes must be made in the way chips are produced, claiming "we must use a light source with a wavelength short enough to allow the minimum feature size on a chip to go down to possibly as low as 12 nanometers."
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