U.S. EUV consortium strikes photoresist alliances to help speed R&D
By Mark LaPedus
Semiconductor Business News
(04/12/01 17:05 p.m. EST)
LIVERMORE, Calif. -- Hoping to stay one step ahead in the next-generation lithography (NGL) race, the U.S.-led Extreme Ultraviolet Limited Liability Co. consortium this week disclosed plans to expand collaboration with photoresist suppliers to accelerate EUV development.
During a press conference here on Wednesday, consortium officials announced that the group was initially co-developing EUV-based photoresists with Shipley Co. of Marlborough, Mass. The consortium is also beginning to work with other photoresist suppliers, such as Arch Chemicals Inc., said John Carruthers, a consultant for the EUV LLC and managing director of Carruthers Consulting LLC in Beaverton, Ore.
Shipley has "been with us from the very beginning," Carruthers said in the press briefing on Wednesday. "Other people are also coming on board."
Until now, the EUV consortium has not identified its partners in photoresists, which is considered a key piece in the lithography puzzle, said analysts.
This week's disclosure is part of a major thrust by the EUV LLC consortium to speed up development of critical materials and infrastructure for tools based on extreme-ultraviolet light exposure technology. In addition to resists, the EUV consortium is also developing alliances in the photomask arena.
Last month, for example, Intel Corp. disclosed it has developed and shipped the world's first blank photomask substrates for exposure tools based on EUV technology (see March 8 story).
The photomask substrate has been delivered to the EUV LLC consortium, which is promoting and developing technology for fabrication of devices with 0.07-micron (70-nm) feature sizes and below. In addition to Intel, the consortium includes Advanced Micro Devices, Micron, IBM, Infineon, Motorola, and three U.S. national laboratories.
The photoresist alliances are among the latest moves by the U.S.-backed EUV consortium to stay ahead of competing efforts and technologies around the world. For example, Japan's Canon Inc. is also aggressively developing a competing set of tools based on its own extreme ultraviolet technology. Canon is aiming to roll out its EUV systems by 2005 (see March 1 story).
The U.S.-based EUV consortium is also racing against the another team of IBM Corp. and Nikon Inc. in Japan, which are co-developing next-generation lithography tools, based on electron projection lithography (EPL) technology (see Feb. 28 story).
Like the U.S. EUV consortium, Nikon's EPL project is developing a range of alliances with resist, photomask, and other material suppliers in an attempt to put the technology into introduce production lithography systems by 2004 (see Feb. 22 story). |
