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Talking imprint at NSTI with Nanolithosolution's Bo Pi |
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May 28, 2007 at 03:03 PM |
The newest player to enter the nanoimprint-lithography equipment fray is Nanolithosolution, which has commercialized UV-NIL IP held by Hewlett-Packard .
Chip Shots ran a short post on May 3, noting how the HP-generated PR announcing the company's launch misspelled its name (for the record, no plural "s" at the end) and how the misspelling virally mutated throughout the ensuing (and rather prolific) news coverage.
Although Nanolithosolution (NLS) didn't exhibit at NSTI Nanotech, company CEO Bo Pi came to the show to make a presentation and also carved out some time to bring me up to speed about his latest venture. He told me that they plan to target the research market first, both with a 4-inch-wafer stand-alone system and an easy-to-use module that can be plugged into the thousands of traditional aligner tools populating facilities around the world, thus providing an "upgrade from micro to nano."
Although the next stage in the company's development will be to find a "killer app" and possibly move into production-type equipment, Bo wants to keep the company a "reasonable size." He emphasized the need to pay attention to service, since he hears complaints that certain NIL tool vendors "just sell the hardware and don't offer any process help."
NLS took nine months to develop a commercial version of the tool and has beta systems at HP and UCLA, with a couple more confirmed university customers. Feature sizes down to at least 17 nm and a variety of sophisticated imprints have been achieved. As for throughput (though not the biggest concern in a lab setting), Bo says he "can do a wafer every few minutes." The individual modules are made by a contract manufacturing partner, and then assembled at NLS's Carlsbad facility in northern San Diego county.
Bo has a bit of the missionary in him, as he sees NLS's products as a way to "proliferate nanopatterning" and familiarize students, professors, and other researchers with imprint technology. He wants to teach each aspect of NIL--molds, resist, process, and equipment. His goal: "make it simple, affordable, and guarantee a good result....Then a researcher doesn't have to worry about whether they can nanopattern, but can [focus] on studying tricky science instead."
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