Accelerator-based compact extreme ultraviolet (EUV) sources for lithography

Extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) is a next-generation technology using light at 13.5 nm. We start with general discussion about accelerator based approaches for compact EUV source generation, including Laser Induced Microbunching (LIM) schemes, High-Gain Inverse Compton (HGIC) source, etc. Such accelerator based EUV sources are compared to laser-produced plasma (LPP) source. Besides the high average power required by EUVL; for industrial applications, EUV source’s stability is an important measure. A storage-ring based steadystate microbunching (SSMB) configuration (Chao, Int. J. Mod. Phys. A, 2015) is a very promising approach providing EUV source at kilowatts level average power meeting the high volume manufacturing requirements for EUVL. SSMB overcomes the large pulse-to-pulse power fluctuation commonly existing in single-pass high-gain systems, e.g., a self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) free-electron laser. In a reversible SSMB configuration, the generation of high peak power EUV source and keeping high repetition rate are nicely decoupled.