Product category:
IC and Hybrid Processing Equipment
News Release from: Vistec Electron Beam
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 15 March 2007
Shrinking life cycles good for e-beam
lithography
Luncheon Symposium reports on conditions affecting the application of 'electron beam direct write' as a manufacturing technology for semiconductors.
The first E-Beam Direct Write Luncheon Symposium held by Vistec Electron Beam underlined 'Electron beam direct write' as a cost-effective technology and an increasingly important solution in semiconductor production During this year's SPIE Conference, Vistec Electron Beam invited recognised industry experts to discuss the latest developments in e-beam direct write (EBDW)
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 10 Apr 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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The participants of the luncheon were comprehensively informed by Dr Hans C Pfeiffer (HCP, USA) about the potential and latest developments of e-beam lithography.
Ines Stolberg (Vistec Electron Beam ) reported on the range of current applications at Vistec.
Both Dr Laurent Pain (STMicroelectronics, France) and Christian Arndt (Qimonda, Germany) presented further applications and research efforts.
"We're pleased that our customers are open to sharing their experiences with industry experts", says Ines Stolberg, Strategic Marketing Manager at Vistec.
"There were lots of excellent discussions and the positive response to the symposium was due to a key SPIE Conference topic: costs in semiconductor manufacturing".
Increasingly smaller structures raise the cost of producing masks, and some processes use two masks, as in Double Patterning.
At the same time, product life cycles continue to shrink and products need to get to market more quickly.
This makes mid-sized (or smaller) product runs unfeasible, while the demand for increasingly specialised ICs grows.
And this is one of the fields where EBDW offers a cost-effective solution for quick production of prototypes and small production runs.
Thanks to the EBDW's high degree of flexibility and its excellent resolution performance it is already possible today to develop processes for emerging technology levels - and to launch products on the market with the required speed.
Also discussed at the EBDW luncheon were the low throughput rates - currently the only disadvantage of EBDW, and the massively parallel litho processes as a possible solution.
Ines Stolberg confirms that this approach is also being considered at Vistec: "Our involvement in this area raised a lot of interest among industry experts".
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