tag: EUV

Beam Me Up
By Ed Sperling - 18 Oct, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus For years, electron-beam tools have been struggling to keep up with photomask complexity, causing an alarming increase in write times and mask production costs. Intel and others recently warned that e-beams soon could reach their fundamental limits, thereby requiring the need for new solutions. And in the multiple patterning era, mask makers could see their capital costs soa... » read more

Behind The Mask
By Ed Sperling - 18 Oct, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down to discuss the current and future photomask manufacturing challenges with Franklin Kalk, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Toppan Photomasks, one of the world’s largest merchant mask makers. SMD: The outlook for the photomask industry is for 2% growth in 2012. Do you agree with that? Kalk: That’s ... » read more

Deep Inside Intel
By Ed Sperling - 18 Oct, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down with Mark Bohr, senior fellow at Intel, to talk about a wide range of manufacturing and design issues Intel is wrestling with at advanced nodes—and just how far the road map now extends. SMD: Will EUV make 10nm? And if it doesn’t, what effect will that have on Intel? Bohr: For a process module as critical as lithography... » read more

Experts At The Table: Issues In Lithography
By Ed Sperling - 18 Oct, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down to discuss future lithography challenges with Juan Rey, senior director of engineering at Mentor Graphics; Aki Fujimura, chairman and chief executive at D2S; and Tatsuo Enami, general manager for the sales division at Gigaphoton. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SMD: What are the big challenges in lithography?... » read more

ASML to Buy Cymer
By Chris Mack - 17 Oct, 2012 - Comments: 0

"We have experienced some delay in EUV, basically caused by delays in developing the light source", said Peter Wennink, ASML's financial chief. With that understatement, ASML succinctly explained its rationale for offering $2.6B in cash (25%) and stock (75%) to buy San Diego-based Cymer, the leading developer of EUV sources.  Over the last year, ASML has sent about 500 of their engineers to... » read more

A Mischievous Muse
By Marc David Levenson - 20 Sep, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Marc David Levenson Moorissa, the muse of high technology, enjoys playing practical jokes on the mask-makers, whose annual meeting was the week of Sept. 10 in Monterey. It started long ago…For example, no sooner had mask makers learned how to write precise 1X masks with fancy electron beams than the wafer printing industry went to reduction steppers, negating the advantages of all that pr... » read more

Experts At The Table: IC Manufacturing Challenges
By Ed Sperling - 20 Sep, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down to discuss future manufacturing challenges with Carlos Mazure, chief technical officer at Soitec; Jeff Hebb, vice president of laser product marketing at Ultratech; Markus Wimplinger, corporate technology development and IP director at EV Group; and Girish Dixit, vice president of the customer integration center and process inte... » read more

DSA: High Stakes Game Of Alphabet Soup
By Ed Sperling - 20 Sep, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus Directed self-assembly (DSA) is making progress for potential use in semiconductor production, but the industry must make some major advances in a sometimes forgotten and unsung segment—materials. DSA is a complementary patterning technology that makes use of block copolymer materials to enable fine pitches in chip designs. But today’s block copolymers based on poly (MMA... » read more

There’s More To EUV Than Source Power
By Katherine Derbyshire - 20 Sep, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Katherine Derbyshire For some time now, most industry coverage of EUV lithography has focused on the light source. As my colleagues have pointed out, source power limitations impose major constraints on not only potential EUV-based device manufacturing, but even on development of sub-20nm devices and process technologies. When throughput is in the neighborhood of four wafers per hour, lear... » read more

Who Owns What And Why
By Ed Sperling - 23 Aug, 2012 - Comments: 0

Who’s calling the shots these days—and how long they’ll continue calling the shots—is turning out to be as much conjecture as playing the futures exchange. There are so many changes underway that even engineers are crossing boundaries no one ever expected and ending up in companies outside of IC design or moving from seemingly far afield into the design world. Still, there are some c... » read more

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