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Researchers make ‘maskless’ lithography breakthrough
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02/12/2008
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European researchers claim to have developed a promising solution to ‘maskless’ semiconductor lithography. The approach is said to reduce the costs and production times associated with low volume device manufacture and prototyping.
The RIMANA project was set up to demonstrate the feasibility of Projection Maskless Lithography (PML2). The approach uses a variety of technologies in combination to burn a chip without a mask.
“The idea behind PML2 has been around for a long time,” said project administrator Dr Hans Loeschner. “A similar system was proposed in the 1980s, but there were problems that were impossible to solve at the time.”
RIMANA’s solution is an electron beam that is directed to an aperture plate system that splits the beam into many thousands of smaller beams.
These pass to a blanking plate, which deflects individual beams. Only undeflected beams reach the wafer’s surface, where they create the pattern needed for circuit fabrication.
“A 25mm diameter electron beam could be split into many hundreds of 1000µm beams and we then reduce those beams to less than 20nm,” Dr Loeschner noted.
RIMANA tested its technology on 32nm and 22nm circuit patterns, with a half pitch of 16nm achieved, surpassing the project’s target of a 22nm half pitch.
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Author
Graham Pitcher
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