Betty, thanks for your postings. I was on vacation. I liked the two paragraphs on the funding by DARPA relating to progress made by JMAR and their goal of getting something done by the end of the year (now only 5 months away). Between this and the other JSI and JPSI products expected by yearend, it sets up next year to be finally the big year for sales and product growth. Also its encouraging that DARPA continues to fund JMAR's R&D. JMAR can use its warrant money for product development since DARPA is picking up the x-ray.
It appears that JMAR may be trying to do the XRL with 4 beams instead of 8 beams according to this information. When Martinez refers to 70 nanometers, I assume that is .07 microns?
Richard M. Foster, president of JMAR Research Inc. (JRI), the JMAR division developing the company's PXS light source, added, ``DARPA funding for our X-ray Lithography (XRL) program over the past two years has enabled JMAR to establish a substantial technological foundation for our PXS lithography light source. These advances include the upgrading of our Britelight(TM) laser so it could produce the beam quality necessary for efficient XRL in a module only two to three cubic feet in size capable of reliably producing the 75 watts to 125 watts of short pulse laser power required for that process. We have also routinely generated laser-to-X-ray conversion efficiencies in the 3 percent to 6 percent range (depending upon the laser light wavelength) and, with the demonstrated improvements in X-ray beam collimation technology, we have increased the X-ray power incident on the mask/wafer lithography target 20 to 40 times over this two-year period. I expect that these performance increases will eventually transfer directly into an equivalent improvement in wafer processing throughput rates based on lower x-ray output levels than we previously expected would be required.''
Dr. Martinez concluded, ``This new contract funding should enable us to complete a four-beam PXS module before the end of this year to power a viable, entry-level production lithography device. We believe that module will become the basic building block for a multi-module system capable of commercially-viable IC processing rates of both GaAs and silicon wafers having feature sizes of 70 nanometers, or less.'' |
