Read the Brookhaven National Laboratory News Release Here
UPTON, N.Y. — Two major U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratories and NY Creates, a New York-based semiconductor research center that convenes key members of the microelectronics industry, have launched a pilot program funded by the DOE Office of Science to accelerate the development of advanced semiconductor chips. The pilot program was announced in September at a kickoff meeting at the Albany NanoTech Complex, owned and operated by the nonprofit New York Center for Research, Economic Advancement, Technology, Engineering, and Science (NY Creates). The program will facilitate access to world-class scientific User Facilities and expertise at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for chip manufacturers and foster connections among scientists and the industrial partners who ultimately transform laboratory advances into commercial products.
Through this pilot program, industry partners will work with Lab experts to design experiments that address the most significant challenges the industry identifies. The pilot will lower barriers for these industrial partners to access the National Laboratories’ state-of-the-art equipment. This will ultimately speed the deployment of discoveries and innovations at those facilities into the next generation of chips for essential technologies, including those needed for advanced applications in Super Intelligence (SI).
“This pilot program will explore avenues for bolstering U.S. technological leadership in the semiconductor industry,” said DOE Associate Director of Science for Basic Energy Sciences Bindu Nair. “By leveraging the unique capabilities and expertise at each facility, we can enhance U.S. competitiveness in a field that is of paramount importance to the nation’s strategic and economic security.”
The collaboration will identify high-priority areas of research in microelectronics, plan and execute experiments, and accelerate the analysis of data to push the field forward. Through workshops and technical exchanges, the collaborators will identify ways to leverage the DOE Office of Science User Facilities and scientific expertise at the Labs to translate the most pressing industrial microelectronics challenges into new approaches for materials characterization and semiconductor patterning.
Two major areas of interest will be developing and enhancing capabilities for lithography, the process used for patterning microscale electronic circuits, and metrology, the measurement and characterization of properties in the semiconductor materials used to make chips.
The DOE User Facilities at Berkeley Lab and Brookhaven Lab house state-of-the-art scientific instruments to advance both missions. These include capabilities for high numerical aperture (NA) extreme ultraviolet (EUV) patterning and advanced materials characterization at the Advanced Light Source and Molecular Foundry at Berkeley Lab, and a broad suite of synchrotron-based X-ray metrology, nanoscale imaging, spectroscopy, scattering, and materials characterization capabilities at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) and Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) at Brookhaven. These tools can be used to rapidly screen and evaluate new materials and techniques needed for EUV.
Background on EUV lithography
EUV lithography uses ultraviolet light to etch precise patterns onto silicon wafers, enabling the production of small, fast, and energy-efficient electronics. This is the primary technology used to manufacture the leading-edge semiconductor chips needed to support the growing demand for computationally intensive applications. It will allow further miniaturization of semiconductor chips to improve their performance and power efficiency — both crucial for meeting the increasing power demands of computation and for reclaiming U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing. High NA EUV increases the resolution of EUV lithography, enabling the creation of smaller, more efficient chips.
Basic to Breakthrough: Pushing the Boundaries of Moore’s Law with Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography
Creates, which hosts a world-leading semiconductor research and development (R&D) facility that includes both low numerical aperture and soon, high NA EUV capabilities as part of its High NA EUV Lithography Center in Albany, New York, will provide semiconductor manufacturing perspective and facilitate industry engagement. They will help translate the challenges the industry currently faces — in terms of both the materials used and the processes for manufacturing — into opportunities for joint exploration and development. Creates will serve as an active co-development and execution partner, helping engage industry super-users to validate and refine approaches and accelerate their transition toward industrial adoption.
The pilot program will help raise awareness of the DOE User Facilities, capabilities, and expertise among a broader community of industry users; enable access to the facilities and the development of workflows and models to support the experiments and analysis; and work on pre-competitive challenges with semiconductor companies, tool manufacturers, and materials specialists.
“Collaboration among the DOE Laboratories and Creates, while leveraging direct connections to an ecosystem of leading industrial partners, our High NA EUV Lithography Center, and team of experts, will provide a unique domestic R&D environment to support this pilot program and the development of next-generation EUV lithography capabilities as well as a domestic production base for novel microelectronics devices,” said Dave Anderson, Creates president and CEO. “We are thrilled to announce this strategic partnership with the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and further build on our collective capabilities.”
Brookhaven Lab Director John Hill said, “Brookhaven National Laboratory has already established a strong working relationship with NY Creates, which has leveraged high resolution X-ray beamlines at NSLS-II to conduct unique studies for the most advanced semiconductor technologies. We are excited to be collaborating with them, Berkeley Lab, and U.S. industry to accelerate U.S. leadership in microelectronics, particularly in advancing EUV lithography, using Brookhaven Lab’s world leading facilities and expertise.”
Berkeley Lab Interim Deputy Laboratory Director for Research and Chief Research Officer Jeff Neaton said, “The challenges posed by next-generation EUV lithography demand breakthroughs in nanoscale patterning science and leading-edge fabrication and characterization tools, and harnessing advanced computing models. Berkeley Lab is excited to be part of this pilot program and to contribute our expertise in chemical and materials science and scientific computing, as well as our soft X-ray synchrotron and nanoscale science capabilities and our specialized facilities in EUV lithography, building on decades of progress at the Center for X-ray Optics.”
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About NY Creates
NY Creates serves as a lab-to-fab bridge for advanced electronics, fostering public-private and industry-academic partnerships for technology development and innovation. Creates attracts and leads industry-connected innovation and commercialization projects that secure significant investment, advance R&D in emerging technologies, and generate the jobs of tomorrow. Creates runs some of the most advanced facilities in the world, boasts more than 2,700 industry experts and faculty, and manages public and private investments of $25 billion—placing it at the global epicenter of high-tech innovation and commercialization.
About Brookhaven National Laboratory
One of 10 National Laboratories overseen and primarily funded by DOE’s Office of Science, Brookhaven Lab conducts research in the physical, biological, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies, computation, quantum technologies, and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry, and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed by Brookhaven Science Associates, a partnership founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit applied science and technology organization.
About Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley Lab is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The Lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the Lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 16 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram National Laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov .