Design Ideas for Integrated High-Voltage Power Supply in Lithography Machines

In the field of semiconductor manufacturing, lithography machines are key equipment, and their performance directly determines the precision and yield of chips. As the core energy supply unit for the optical system and drive module of lithography machines, the design level of high-voltage power supplies is crucial to the overall stability of the equipment. With the breakthrough of chip processes to the 7nm and below nodes, lithography machines have put forward higher requirements for the volume, efficiency, ripple control, and response speed of high-voltage power supplies. The traditional discrete design can no longer meet the needs of equipment miniaturization and high-precision development due to problems such as large volume, complex wiring, and weak anti-interference ability. Therefore, integrated design has become the core path to solve this contradiction.
The integrated design of high-voltage power supplies for lithography machines must take functional modularization, compact architecture, and intelligent control as the core principles, and make simultaneous breakthroughs in both hardware architecture and software algorithms. At the hardware level, the first step is to achieve the integration of power units: using Multi-Chip Module (MCM) technology to package core components such as high-voltage power switches, drive circuits, and sampling resistors into one unit. This reduces the length of external wiring, lowers parasitic inductance and capacitance, thereby suppressing voltage spikes generated during switching processes and improving the anti-interference ability of the power supply. At the same time, combined with Three-Dimensional Integrated Circuit (3D IC) technology, the high-voltage conversion module and low-voltage control module are stacked vertically, which increases functional density without expanding the planar area, meeting the installation requirements of the narrow space inside lithography machines.
Secondly, an integrated control and protection system needs to be built. In traditional high-voltage power supplies, the control circuit and protection circuit are set separately, resulting in long response delays, which easily cause damage to the optical components of lithography machines due to overvoltage and overcurrent faults. In the integrated design, it is necessary to integrate the Digital Signal Processor (DSP), Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), and voltage-current sampling chip into the same control unit. Through hardware logic circuits, real-time collection and processing of fault signals are realized, shortening the protection response time to the microsecond level. At the same time, an adaptive control algorithm is embedded, which can dynamically adjust the output voltage precision according to the working status of the lithography machine (such as exposure dose and scanning speed), controlling the ripple coefficient within 0.1% to ensure the stability of the beam energy.
At the software level, the integrated design needs to strengthen the coordination between the power supply and the main control system of the lithography machine. Through a standardized communication interface (such as EtherCAT), data interaction between the high-voltage power supply and the main control unit of the equipment is realized. It can upload the working parameters of the power supply (output voltage, current, temperature) in real time and receive instructions from the main control unit to adjust the output status, avoiding exposure precision deviations caused by information delays. In addition, a health management module can be integrated. Through long-term monitoring and trend analysis of the key parameters of the power supply, potential faults (such as capacitor aging and power tube performance degradation) can be warned in advance, reducing the cost of equipment shutdown and maintenance.
It should be noted that the integrated design of high-voltage power supplies for lithography machines still faces two major challenges: heat dissipation and insulation. Under high power density, components generate concentrated heat, so a composite heat dissipation scheme of microchannel water cooling + thermal interface materials is required to control the temperature of core components below 85°C. At the same time, multi-layer insulating materials and air gap isolation design should be adopted between the high-voltage module and low-voltage module to ensure that the insulation strength meets the voltage resistance requirement of more than 10kV. In the future, with the application of wide-bandgap semiconductor materials (such as silicon carbide and gallium nitride), the integrated design of high-voltage power supplies will further break through the bottlenecks of efficiency and power density, providing core support for the development of lithography machines towards higher-precision processes.