Samsung takes EUV lithography into production for its 7-nm LPP node
Samsung announced yesterday evening that its 7-nm Low Power Plus (LPP) process technology is ready to roll. The company says it has completed development of that next-generation process technology and is now turning out production wafers with it. That milestone is remarkable because 7-nm LPP is the only process technology in the world so far to use extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV, tools to inscribe features on silicon. Samsung's adoption of the technology is especially ambitious because the company is using it for critical layers in the stack of elements that go into a modern chip, not just for low-risk features like contacts and vias (as GlobalFoundries had planned to do before it abandoned 7-nm development entirely).
Samsung's S3 EUV production line ...