Bid to prolong life of 197nm litho process David Manners Europe's leading semiconductor process development house IMEC (International Microelectronics Centre) at the University of Leuven, has entered into a co-operation with the leading US process development consortium Sematech. The collaboration started this year to develop lithography techniques that will sustain Moore's Law progress until 2007/8. "What we're doing with Sematech is
to execute a programme to look at how far we can extend 197nm processing," Dr Luc van den Hove, vice-president for lithography research at IMEC told EW. 197nm - referring to the wavelength of the UV beam used to draw patterns on chips - is the processing technique which is the successor to the 248nm wavelength used in the i-line processing most commonly used today. "We are also looking at how far we can extend 157nm," added van den Hove. Asked how far he
reckoned the different wavelengths would go, van den Hove replied: "With the use of strong enhancement techniques [like phase shift mask optical proximity correction etc] today's thinking is we can extend 193nm to 100nm processing and 157nm to 70nm processing." 70nm, according to the SIA roadmap, is the lithography feature size which will be used in commercial mass market chips in the 2007/8 timeframe.