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Product Briefing Outline: SII Nano Technology has launched "SmartMRC" mask rule checker software package that is designed to be used for mask data verification as part of the requirement for manufacturing and inspection of advanced photomasks. SmartMRC was jointly developed with Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. and will be available from April 2006.

Problem: The aggressive OPC and advanced RET techniques are now used to deal with the lithographical limitations due to the ever finer feature sizes in recent semiconductor devices. As the number of fine patterns increases and the volume of data grow, the quality requirements on photomasks are becoming demanding. This causes longer times for mask manufacturing and inspection, which may increase costs and delivery times.

Solution: SmartMRC is a software tool to detect potential problems in the mask manufacturing and inspection processes by extracting and checking the mask design data prior to the manufacture. This advanced data verification reduces mask manufacturing defects and falsely detected errors during mask inspection that in turn helps to reduce mask costs and production times.

Applications: Advanced photomasks 100nm and below.

Platform: SmartMRC employs a limit check function for mask drawing and inspection,
SEM measurement point extraction for verifying pattern uniformity in the manufactured mask and internal data checks during mask data conversion and mask data substitution. Enables direct input of the mask drawing data without GDS format conversion and is available with a distributed computing option for linear speedup by parallel processing with a few tens of processors.

Availability: April 2006 onwards