Lace Lithography AS (Bergen, Norway) is developing a form of lithography that uses atoms fired at a surface to define features at resolutions beyond what is possible using extreme ultraviolet lithography.
What Lace Litho calls BEUV can theoretically achieve finer features supporting the continued miniaturization of transistors and extending Moore’s Law.
The company was co-founded in July 2023 by CEO Professor Bodil Holst of University of Bergen and CTO Adria Salvador Palau, who gained his PhD at the University of Bergen but now operates out of Barcelona, Spain.
Conventional EUV systems use 13.5 nm wavelength light to create patterns on wafers through a series of mirrors and masks. Atomic lithography enables direct maskless patterning at resolutions smaller than what is possible with wavelength-limited EUV systems.
“By using atoms instead of light, we provide chip manufacturers with capabilities 15 years ahead of current technology, in a more cost-effective way and with a significantly lower energy footprint,” the company claims on its website.
Salvador Palau and Professor Holst were co-authors on a paper, published in Physics Review A, entitled True-to-size surface mapping with neutral helium atoms. This presents details of the implementation and operation of a stereo helium microscope.
FabouLACE is a European Union funded project to develop dispersion force masked-based helium atom lithography with a budget of €2.5 million provided by the European Innovation Council. The project’s start date was December 1, 2023 and its runs until November 30, 2026.
FabouLACE uses metastable atoms and dispersion force-based masks and enables features of 2 nm. Lace Lithography is chartered to bring the technology to market by 2031, according to the European Commission. Meanwhile the performance of the technology will be monitored and validated by the IMEC research institute. NanoLACE was an earlier Euopean research project that closed 31 December 2024. That project started in 2019 and received €3.36 million towards its budget of €3.65 million.
Lace Lithography raised a seed round of funding in July 2023 of about €450,000 backed by Runa Capital, Vsquared Ventures, Future Ventures, the European Innovation Council, Innovation Norway and the Norwegian Research Council.
So far the company now has assembled a team of more than 20 physicists, engineers and operators.
