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To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (22460)	7/9/1999 2:14:00 PM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25960

Team seeks to ease use of optical proximity correction eetimes.com By Peter Clarke EE Times (07/09/99, 1:41 p.m. EDT) SANTA CLARA, Calif. — ASM MaskTools Inc. and Transcription Enterprises Ltd. (Los Gatos, Calif.) have agreed to work together to simplify the use and efficiency of optical proximity correction for the manufacture of deep-submicron chips. Under the deal, ASM MaskTools will integrate MaskRigger, its optical proximity correction (OPC) software, with Transcription's market-leading Computer Aided Transcription Software (CATS). The combination "enables the practical application of optical extension technology at the most cost-efficient point in the data preparation process," said Roger Caldwell, vice president and chief operating officer at ASM MaskTools (Santa Clara), a recently acquired subsidiary of ASM Lithography NV (Veldhoven, Netherlands). "And we expect to see much greater use of this OPC technology in volume IC production." The company's MaskRigger tool is a batch-mode geometry processor that performs optical proximity correction utilizing a technique involving the application of assist features referred to as scattering bars. CATS is a mask manufacturing, inspection and direct-write-on-wafer data-preparation software package. The CATS software is often used as the final step in the chip design-automation process, where the design data undergoes conversion from the industry-standard GDSII format used in design to the mask-writing and inspection formats used to fabricate masks. Under the agreement between the two companies, MaskRigger will be offered as an upgrade to CATS to provide a solution for semiconductor manufacturers designing masks with line widths smaller than the wavelength of the light used for photolithography. According to the companies, initial experiments indicate that a CATS-integrated version can yield an 18-times improvement in MaskRigger performance when compared to standalone processing. "The interest in MaskRigger from our customer base is what led us into this relationship between Transcription and MaskTools, which we believe will be very productive and beneficial to the semiconductor industry," said Roger Sturgeon, president of Transcription Enterprises. "With CATS' advanced fracturing techniques including hierarchical processing and multi-threaded fracturing, we believe the integrated CATS-MaskRigger solution will offer substantial performance improvement over the standalone OPC tool." MaskTools and Transcription Enterprises expect the integration of MaskRigger and CATS to be complete by the middle of the summer and available in a production release of CATS (version 18) this fall. The two companies were brought together by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), which recently licensed MaskRigger for 0.18-micron production. "TSMC's mask-making operations are one of the most highly automated in the world; therefore we are pleased with the efforts of MaskTools and Transcription to bring this productivity-enhancing solution to the market," said C. S. Yoo, director of TSMC E-Beam Operations. "This enables TSMC to provide our customers with more advanced process technologies, and maintain our industry-leading IC fab cycle times."