JMAR Technologies Awarded $500,000 Contract to Design, Build, and Evaluate Advanced X-Ray Optical Components
SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 11, 1999--JMAR Technologies, Inc.
(Nasdaq NM:JMAR), a growing provider of precision micro-technology products, announced today that it has been awarded a $500,000 contract to design, build, and evaluate advanced X-ray optical components for its X-ray lithography program.
The contract, issued by the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command, is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
"This is an important contract award for JMAR Technologies," said Company Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John S. Martinez, Ph.D. "We believe that the new technology can significantly increase the semiconductor wafer throughput of JMAR's proprietary picosecond X-ray lithography source (PXS) and further advance the company's position as the leading developer of compact, laser-generated X-ray sources for a variety of "soft" X-ray applications, including semiconductor lithography."
Under the contract, JMAR will receive leading-edge resonance reflection collimators recently developed under the advanced X-ray optics program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) at the University of California, Berkeley. Collimators are devices designed to capture the diverging X-ray beam produced by JMAR's PXS and direct it into a parallel beam to illuminate the mask/wafer assemblies during the critical lithography step in semiconductor manufacturing. JMAR will integrate the collimators with its PXS to evaluate their ability to improve the overall efficiency and resolution capability of the lithography process.
Added Dr. Martinez, "By combining the latest advances in our X-ray source technology with cutting edge optics from LLNL and elsewhere, we are close to demonstrating an alternative source for X-ray lithography that will be far smaller and much less expensive than the electron synchrotrons that have been developed for this application. Those advancements, which include the major X-ray power scale up of our PXS program that is currently underway, should enable us to meet several commercially significant demonstration milestones before the end of calendar 1999." |
