Design considerations of 10 kW-scale, extreme ultraviolet SASE FEL for lithography

The semiconductor industry growth is driven to a large extent by steady advancements in microlithography. According to the newly updated industry road map, the 70nm generation is anticipated to be available in the year 2008. However, the path to get there is not clear. The problem of construction of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) quantum lasers for lithography is still unsolved: progress in this field is rather moderate and we cannot expect a significant breakthrough in the near future. Nevertheless, there is clear path for optical lithography to take us to sub-100nm dimensions. Theoretical and experimental work in Self-Amplified Spontaneous Emission (SASE) Free Electron Lasers (FEL) physics and the physics of superconducting linear accelerators over the last 10 years has pointed to the possibility of the generation of high-power optical beams with laser-like characteristics in the EUV spectral range. Recently, there have been important advances in demonstrating a high-gain SASE FEL at 100nm wavelength (J. Andruszkov, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 85 (2000) 3821). The SASE FEL concept eliminates the need for an optical cavity. As a result, there are no apparent limitations which would prevent operating at very short wavelength range and increasing the average output power of this device up to 10-kW level. The use of super conducting energy-recovery linac could produce a major, cost-efficient facility with wall plug power to output optical power efficiency of about 1%. A 10-kW scale transversely coherent radiation source with narrow bandwidth (0.5%) and variable wavelength could be excellent tool for manufacturing computer chips with the minimum feature size below 100nm. All components of the proposed SASE FEL equipment (injector, driver accelerator structure, energy recovery system, undulator, etc.) have been demonstrated in practice. This is guaranteed success in the time-schedule requirement.