Toppan preps photomask for 0.05-micron process
By Paul Kallender
EE Times
(03/05/01 14:25 p.m. PST)
TOKYO — Toppan Printing Co. has developed a prototype photomask for 0.05-micron process technology and is already working with partners to implement the technology in 2005.
While the photomask, developed at the request of Advantest Corp.(San Jose, Calif.), is still in research phase, officials at Toppan said they were satisfied that the prototype, suitable for 6-inch wafers, could be developed for manufacturing purposes within four years.
"It is still officially in the R&D stage, but our progress to date proves we can develop it commercially, yes we can. We believe we are the leaders in this field," said Kazutoshi Abe, manager of Toppan's new product planning division.
"We have achieved a critical step. The most important issues next are the inspection and writer machines. We are now coworking with those machine makers," said Yuichi Kumamoto, general manager of Toppan's worldwide strategic sales division. Kumamoto wouldn't name Toppan's partners, but said the company is working with two Japanese-based writer machine makers, adding that the inspector machine partner was a large semiconductor company.
Based on silicon, the photomask in theory will be suitable for the Advantest direct electron-beam, block cell approach, or for Hitachi Ltd.'s cell projection mask approach, or for Nikon Corp.'s own electron-beam method at the 50-nm process node, said Abe. Advantest's method creates a block pattern with 60 cells, Hitachi's uses 25 cells and Nikon's uses only four, he said. Theoretically, the Nikon approach leads to the smallest reticle, a factor in its advantage, he said.
With about a 22 percent share of the $1.5 billion worldwide non-captive photomask market in 2000, Toppan claims it is in a leading position to have its production masks verified for 0.13-micron production and is already entering volume production at that process node, said Kumamoto.
Meanwhile, Toppan's biggest rival, Dai Nippon Printing (Tokyo), is aggressively pushing toward the same goal, announcing late last week that it is investing $42 million to build a 4,410- square-meter production facility at its Kyoto plant aimed at mask production at the 0.13-micron design rule. After taking over Hitachi's semiconductor photomask operations in June 1999 and signing a technology agreement in December of that year to import Toshiba Corp.'s 0.15-micron process technology, Dai Nippon has already increased the 20 percent, $345 million global market share it held last year to 25 percent this year, according to a Dai Nippon spokesman.
As Toppan and Dai Nippon square off for the 0.13-micron process era, concern about the future of the F2 approach for sub-1.0-micron nodes is growing, according to industry sources here, who believe that ArF lithography can feasibly be stretched down to the 0.07-micron node. Responding to these doubts, Kumamoto said Toppan is committed to developing F2 with both Japan's government-backed Asuka consortium and IMEC, but this technology is a second-order priority to developing the company's silicon mask approach.
"We do, of course, have some confidence in the F2 photomask development, but we have no guess as to when EPL [e-beam projection lithography] will come into play. We are still developing EPL technologies, but it's a schedule after the next schedule," Kumamoto said. |
