Prof. Masato Shibuya was awarded the JSAP Takuma Award 2011 for invention of the phase-shift mask (PSM) and opening the field of advanced lithography, as reported by independent PSM inventor Marc Levenson.

Direct-write, maskless, lithography using e-beams is not ready for 22nm node IC manufacturing, and the SPIE BACUS presentations show EbDW issues include data transfer and inspection.

E-beam Initiative adds four members and starts on Design for E-beam (DFEB) for mask makng for ICs to reduce mask costs at 22nm and below.

Post-optical lithography (NGL) technologies EUV (EUVL), e-beam direct-write (EbDW), and nano-imprint (NIL) all need work as shown at SEMICON/West 2010, major costs limitations.

Another back-to-the-future possibility for next-generation lithography (NGL) is direct write e-beam (DWEB), revitalized with multibeam clusters, curvilinear mask writing, and character projection (CP). The E-beam Initiative used the recent SPIE gathering to announce that it had added six new member companies, including GlobalFoundries and Samsung. Aki Fujimura, CEO of D2S and Managing Director of the […]

This year’s plenary sessions of the SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium exposed the complexities of patterning ICs in high-volume manufacturing (HVM) at the 22nm node and beyond. Steppers using 193nm ArF immersion (193i) will be extended using double-patterning (DP) schemes, since the extreme-ultra-violet litho (EUVL) infrastructure is again delayed. R&D to support DP integration has led […]

If EUV lithography is to succeed, infrastructure gaps will need to be addressed forthwith. The lack of inspection tools for EUV masks and substrates constitutes one such gap, now recognized as a priority by SEMATECH. At the OSA/APS Frontiers in Optics (FiO) meeting held in San Jose, October 11-15, Carmen Menoni of Colorado State University […]

KLA-Tencor recently announced its long awaited 193nm reticle defect inspection tool, the Teron 600. Wafer scanners adopted 193nm exposure wavelength years ago in order to shrink circuit features below the resolution limit set by the previous (248nm) wavelength, roughly 130nm. The photomasks used in those tools, however, continued to be inspected at 257nm, in spite […]

Luminescent Technologies, Inc., a computational lithography company, has broadened its reach by announcing the industry’s first offline computational photomask inspection product (unofficially named LAIPH for Luminescent Automated Image Processing Hub). A “premier company in Asia” is the first customer to qualify the new computational defect review product in volume production. According to a Luminescent representative, […]

Researchers at MIT have demonstrated deep subwavelength lithography using a photochromic contrast enhancing layer, as reported in SciencExpress April 9. A thin photochromic film on top of a conventional photoresist layer was exposed to two wavelengths of light with two distinct patterns. One wavelength exposed the photoresist while the other made the photochromic film opaque […]