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.

Applied Materials kills the turnkey SunFab thin-film a-Si/mc-Si PV line, after failing to keep up with CdTe and CIGS thin-film technologies in efficiency and cost, taking ~$400M loss.

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 […]

Intermolecular, the company that brought combinatorial chemistry to semiconductor manufacturing R&D, has expanded its focus to look at ways to improve basic manufacturing processes for photovoltaic (PV) fabs. “I think that the PV devices of 10 years from now will look significantly different from those of today,” said Intermolecular vice president and general manager of […]

Founded in 1984 with Flemish government support, IMEC has reached 25 years. To celebrate the organization’s accomplishments, BetaSights joined other industry media outlets attending a research review event in beautiful Leuven, Belgium. From 1999 to 2009 has been the “phase of international breakthrough” as described by current president Luc Van den hove. Working with OEMs […]

At SEMICON West this year, ASML announced tools that fleshed out their Holistic Lithography scheme introduced at SPIE’s Advanced Lithography Symposium in February of this year. The key idea of Holistic Lithography, according to Bert Koek, senior vice president of the applications products group at ASML, is integrating computational lithography, wafer printing, and process control […]

IMEC/F-IZM/SUSS/TM vs. SEMATECH/Leti/EVG/Brewer. The leading R&D consortia have aligned (pun intended) with leading equipment and materials suppliers to create ultra-thin silicon wafer handling technologies for 3D ICs. With the ability to shrink circuit dimensions in 2D becoming ever more difficult, most of the world’s IC fab leaders are evaluating the use of the 3rd dimension. […]

James Quinn, CEO of Replisaurus, has been very busy executing for the last few years to bring his vision of a new metallization technology to the IC fab industry. Targeting the formation of Cu interconnects for advanced packaging applications, Quinn has assembled a great team to work with CEA-Leti and other industrial partners on a […]

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, […]

While EUV Lithography may now be inevitable, according to SEMATECH Program Manager Bryan Rice, it may not be indispensable. SEMICON West offered a snapshot of progress towards the 32nm, 22nm, and 16nm device nodes at the Device Scaling TechXPOT, and the industry appears to have patterning options even if EUV encounters further delay. Yan Borodovsky […]