LONDON – Imprint lithography firm Molecular Imprints Inc. (Austin, Texas) has announced that one of its machines being used by a semiconductor company to support the development of chip production on 450-mm diameter wafers. The availability of this machine will shorten the semiconductor industry's transition to 450mm wafers by at least two years, Molecular Imprints also claimed.
Molecular Impints did not reveal the name of the chip company but said an Imprio 450 machine was accepted by the company at the end of 2012. The unit is being used as part of a multi-year wafer services development contract and Robert Bruck, a corporate vice president at Intel Corp. showed one of the first fully-patterned 450-mm diameter wafers at the Industry Strategy Symposium organized by industry body SEMI.
The J-FIL imprint lithography technology has demonstrated 24-nm patterning with line edge roughness of less than 2-nm to 3 signma and critical dimension uniformity to 1.2-nm 3 sigma and offers the prospect of 10-nm patterning with single-step process.
"In an era where multi-year and multi-billion dollar optical lithography development programs are becoming the norm we were able to design, build and deliver an advanced nanoimprint platform in just one year from receiving the customer's purchase order," said Mark Melliar-Smith, CEO of Molecular Imprints, in a statement.
He added that the capabilities of the Imprio 450 were well aligned to the needs of semiconductor memory manufacturing but that the company is alos making progress towards placing J-FIL technology into high volume production of advanced CMOS devices.
Related links and articles:
www.molecularimprints.com
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