German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier announced the winners of the Deutscher Zukunftspreis 2020 at a ceremony held under pandemic restrictions at the Verti Music Hall in Berlin on November 25, 2020. He honored experts from ZEISS, TRUMPF Lasersystems and the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF with his prize for technology and innovation for their project "EUV Lithography - New Light for the Digital Age".
The winning team has made a significant contribution to the development and industrial maturity of EUV technology. The result is a future technology secured by over 2,000 patents that forms the basis for the digitalization of our everyday lives and will enable applications such as autonomous driving, 5G, artificial intelligence and other future innovations.
The manufacturing process for the latest chip generations is based on the use of EUV light. It will enable more powerful, more energy-efficient and more cost-effective chips. EUV stands for "extreme ultraviolet", i.e. light with an extremely short wavelength. From the light source to the optical system in a vacuum to the surface coating of the mirrors used, practically the entire exposure technology had to be developed from scratch.
With the world's most powerful pulsed industrial laser, TRUMPF supplies a key component for the exposure of state-of-the-art microchips. The quality and shape of the illumination system and the resolution of the ZEISS projection optics determine how small structures on microchips can be. The mirrors used in the optical system are a major innovation. As even the smallest irregularities lead to imaging errors, the world's most "precise" mirror was developed for EUV lithography. Fraunhofer acted as an important research partner for the sophisticated coating technology for the large-area mirrors.
