High-power lasers open up new areas, and the world’s first EUV enters the calibration and debugging stage.

Different industries have different definitions of what high power means for lasers. For example, the high power required for industrial applications is very different from the high power required in the biomedical field. The recognizable properties of high power also vary depending on the application. Clean energy research prioritizes precision and control at extreme energy levels, while the military and defense fields focus on beam quality and environmental adaptability.
Industrial demand
Supply and market demand are the common driving forces for the development of industrial lasers. Industries such as semiconductor manufacturing and automobiles have been pursuing higher precision and efficiency, which ensures that developers and manufacturers need to provide more and more advanced lasers.

This demand also determines the performance indicators of laser optical components. Manufacturers of these components strive to produce fine, more powerful, and durable optical devices.
Stefaan Vandendriessche, senior director of Edmund Laser Optics Business Unit, said that whenever industrial laser manufacturers are ready to launch higher-power products, familiar questions reappear, such as “What can be done with such a high power?” Once higher-power laser systems are on the market, customers from the industrial field will quickly discover new applications brought by new power levels.
“While some standard processes, such as those in the 1kW-12kW range, have reached their limits due to production demands, among other reasons, other factors are driving the need for new high-power lasers,” said Tracey Ryba, senior product manager for lasers at TRUMPF North America.

Progress on the world’s first EUV
Intel’s newly formed chip foundry business unit said it has completed the assembly of the world’s first commercial high numerical aperture extreme ultraviolet lithography scanner, setting a major milestone for the chipmaking industry. The new device is the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment currently available and will produce more advanced and powerful computer chips in the future.
The TWINSCAN EXE: 5000 High NA EUV tool was assembled at Intel’s research and development facility in Hillsboro, Oregon, and is currently undergoing a calibration step. Once completed, it will play a key role in advancing Intel’s foundry future process roadmap. The company said the device greatly improves the resolution and feature scaling of next-generation chips by changing the optical design used to project printed images onto silicon wafers.

While Intel’s experts are busy calibrating the new machine, the company is already planning logistics for the next piece of equipment, the TWINSCAN EXE:5200B system. The system is expected to further increase productivity and can etch more than 200 wafers per hour. However, Intel may not win the competition to be the first to launch the next generation of EUV equipment.
Previously, IBM, Micron Technology, and several other institutions announced that they would build an advanced semiconductor research laboratory, which will be equipped with the same system. They also plan to obtain a Twinscan EXE:5200 system for the envisioned 2nm chip manufacturing process that is more advanced than Intel’s 14A, but it is not clear when it will go into production.