Expert Interview: Bruno La Fontaine

Bruno La Fontaine, Director of the Center for X-ray Optics (CXRO), speaks on how the CXRO supports the microchip industry.  

Transcript

My name is Bruno La Fontaine. I’m a physicist at Berkeley Lab, and I also serve as the director for the Center of X-ray Optics, also known as CXRO. The Center for X-ray Optics mainly works on building tools to pattern or structure materials at the nanoscale. And one of the purposes is microelectronics research, specifically in developing EUV lithography, which is one of the main techniques used today for the leading-edge semiconductor chips. 

EUV lithography is a method to print very small circuit features on a silicon wafer during the fabrication of microchips. It uses a wavelength of light that is very short, 13.5 nanometer. So by printing very small circuit features, we can shrink the size of any given circuit, so that enables us to put more circuits in a certain area on the silicon wafer. Or also we can use this property to make the circuits faster or use less energy. 

EUV Lithography has a fundamental role as it enables another several generations of chips with smaller and smaller features, which then will help with this energy consumption. Here at Berkeley and at CXRO in particular, we’ve been building instruments, very advanced instruments ahead of what is available in the industry by several years with capabilities that are not available at anywhere else. We do this fundamental science looking at materials, but we also test materials for our partners that eventually go into equipment, commercial equipment being, you know, whether it’s a calibration of a detector, for instance, or material, a mask that they will be using in their fab. 

This is what also differentiates us. We are the only ones really in the world that have been able to demonstrate successfully designing, building, and operating these tools consistently over the past 25 years. This allows the scientists to really dig into the fundamentals of the problem of the field, but also see their work applied in real life producing devices that everybody on the planet pretty much uses. The cell phone that everybody carries with them has components now, chips that have been made with materials that have at some point been tested here at Berkeley Lab. 

Being successful means that we will be able to produce smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient chips at a high level. So ideally, what we do today will really have enabled the full utilization of the AI capability in 20 years so we will live in a world where we can use AI to solve so many problems that a society is facing.