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Product Briefing Outline: Eco-Snow's advanced, automated MaskClean 150 System is a dry CO2 alternative to conventional cleaning methods for removing particulate and light organic contamination from the surface of photomask substrates. The system is helping a major U.S. photomask manufacturer save money and improve the quality of its photomasks and reticles with a cleaning technology designed for the 28nm DRAM half-pitch technology node. The system reclaims masks by removing contaminants left behind by wet cleaning; preserves mask quality by reducing the number of erosive wet cleaning cycles required and reduces the cycle time required to create masks, since fewer cleanings are needed. Read more >>

Product Briefing Outline: Luminescent Technologies, has broadened its product portfolio by adding what it claims to be the industry’s first offline computational mask inspection product. A premier company in Asia is the first customer to qualify the new computational defect review product in volume production. Read more >>

Product Briefing Outline: KLA-Tencor has announced XP, a new upgrade package for 28xx broadband brightfield inspection systems. The XP package is the first commercially available product to give an inspection system access to standard IC design layout files. With access to this information, the inspection system can use knowledge of the defect’s location within the circuit to better estimate its probability of affecting device yield. In addition, XP can use the results of the design-aware wafer inspection to identify features on the mask that may be particularly sensitive to process variations during printing. These and other features of the XP upgrade package are designed to improve the sensitivity and productivity of existing 28xx inspectors and raise the information content of defect results, helping to accelerate identification and resolution of defect issues. Read more >>