Online information source for semiconductor professionals

Product Briefing Outline: Entegris has introduced its ‘LiquidLens' ultrapure water (UPW) purification system that is designed specifically for 193nm ArF immersion lithography systems. The sub-system combines advanced technology and process expertise from both Entegris and the former Mykrolis as a result of their merger in August 2005 to tackle high-purity issues associated with the needs of immersion lithography. Read more >>

Product Briefing Outline: JEOL, has introduced a new high precision direct write e-beam lithography system. The new JBX-6300FS is a spot beam, vector scan, step and repeat lithography system designed for high volume direct patterning on wafers, and is capable of writing minimum line widths of 8nm, according to the company. 2-inch to 200mm wafers can be accommodated, as well as parts and pieces. An autoloader allows continuous unattended operation of up to 10 cassettes under vacuum. Read more >>

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. Read more >>

Product Briefing Outline: Picarro, a manufacturer of high performance lasers and laser-based instruments, has begun commercial shipments of its next generation ammonia measurement instrument. The instrument, the ESP-1000, is based on Picarro's patented Cavity Ring Down Spectroscopy (CRDS) and achieves better than 1 part-per billion detection of ammonia in ambient air, according to the company. Read more >>

Outline: Aprio Technologies has launched Halo-iOPC, the company's first product with features intended for both the design and manufacturing communities. Halo-iOPC, a superset of Aprio's optical proximity correction (OPC) product, is the first of its second-phase products that begin to enable better collaboration between design and manufacturing. Read more >>

Product Briefing Outline: KLA-Tencor has launched its next-generation photomask inspection system, STARlight-2TM. The system is claimed to be the most cost-effective contamination inspection solution in the industry for all types of photomasks, including mainstream extreme resolution enhancement technique (XRET) photomasks, at the 65nm node and below. According to KLA-Tencor the use of a revolutionary image processing technology is at the heart of the systems performance. The system has been designed for the detection of progressive defects--an increasingly critical class of yield killers that impact device yield over time and can cause catastrophic device reliability problems. Read more >>

Product Briefing Outline: Invarium, Inc has unveiled "DimensionPPC," which it claims to be the industry's first unified, full-chip Process and Proximity Compensation (PPC) product for patterning integrated circuit (IC) layouts at 65 nm and below. Architected from the ground up as a new-generation layout-to-mask solution, DimensionPPC is intended to overcome the deficiencies of today's RET/OPC tools and layout correction techniques for other process effects, from mask through etch. The product has been fab-validated at 65nm during the fourth quarter of 2005. The technology is currently in production deployment at one customer site and is being qualified for production use by five additional leading semiconductor manufacturers. Read more >>

Product Briefing Outline: KLA-Tencor has launched its latest-generation optical CD metrology system, the SpectraCD-XT, which provides inline CD and profile measurements of critical device structures that help enable early prediction of IC performance and yield at the 90-nm and 65-nm nodes. The only high-performance spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE)-based CD metrology tool with sub-two-second move-acquire-measure (MAM) time, SpectraCD-XT provides a two-fold increase in throughput (to more than 100 wph) compared to the previous-generation platform at comparable performance, according to the company. Read more >>