Current Lithography

The current mainstream fabrication uses what is called Immersion Lithography.



Just 2 years ago it was expected that sub 20nm would arrive around 2016 but with Moore's Law remaining true Intel will be shipping 22nm chips in 2012 with 14nm to arrive 2013 and 10nm in 2015. Current 32-22nm resolutions are made using multiple patterning. Double patterning has been in use for a while and triple-multiple patterning will be used for sub 22nm.



Multiple patterning has its limits though, even if it can whittle down to sub 10nm, unless the litho technology improves along with the resolution it may no longer be realistically usable due to poor focal tolerences (printing over the same spot?) or poor output (wafers per hour).

EUV lithography
Extreme UltraViolet lithography was originally hailed to be the successor of current mainstream lithographic processes with a theoretical resolution down to 2nm. As with anything new, it is very expensive and requires a lot of power to create chips that are comparable to current fabrications. Though experiments continue with EUV there are more and more hurdles that keep arising such as the polarising nature of EUV radiation as well as requiring even MORE power for multi patterning as well as requiring complex multilayer optics and expensive superconductive magnets to control the scatter and definition. Intel had hoped to start using EUVL for its <10nm fabrication but the technology is behind in its development and is proving too costly. While the physical potential is there, the technological hurdles and resources required for it to be usable, simply, is not feasible in the near future and likely will not be in mainstream use for maybe another 10 years.