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What were the challenges you were seeing or heard were the biggest? The light source?

Everything was a challenge with EUV—the source, the vacuum, the mirrors, the reflective reticle, getting sufficient throughput…

There were years of hope in the semiconductor industry that somebody would come up with something better rather than having to make that nightmare work.

Alternatives were tried. Synchrotron EUV sources. (works, but huge). Linear accelerators (The SLAC beamline was used as a light source as a test). X-ray lasers (don't work yet). Electron beam lithography (works, but too slow.)

There's got to be a better way to do this.

At Imec I recall electron beam lithography was investigated but just too slow. E-beam was analogous to an inkjet printer.

Whatever happened to Multibeam? [1] They claim to sell a multiple electron beam writer for maskless chip making. They, and their predecessor company, have been at this since 1980. Not much new on the web site, and their last press release was in 2020.

EUV masks are made that way, slowly.

[1] https://multibeamcorp.com/

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