TSMC along with MAPPER achieve new mile-stone in mask-free e-beam etching of wafers

While the semiconductor industry is already making chips at 25 nm, going further down is possible but the road is very steep in achieving. One of the issue is growing cost of light/photo-masks which are used to create the dark-bright patterns of nanometer scale on photo sensitive material coated on silicon wafer for etching the silicon. At lower nodes, the number of masks required and the cost is very high, making the overall semiconductor chip manufacturing technology as tough as rocket science. Semiconductor equipment vendors and fab owners are jointly putting lot of effort to continue the Moore's law for some more years; trying to push wall further. An achievement of small step requires joint sized effort. Billion of dollars got to be poured in to achieve few nano-meter improvements. The semiconductor researchers have found a new way to move the e-beam on the wafer surface in nanometer scale to directly etch silicon surface without using any photomask, so the semiconductor chips can be made without using masks. Even the combination of both processes is also can be a first step. Reducing the manufacturing cost is the big issue in e-beam lithography technology, particularly for volumes. Now Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has reached new mile-stone in developing e-beam lithography by jointly working with MAPPER Lithography.

TSMC and MAPPER Lithography have revealed that a pre-alpha MAPPER tool located on TSMC's Fab 12 GigaFab is repeatedly printing features previously unachievable using current immersion lithography technology.

TSMC states, Over the past several months it has expanded its Maskless Lithography team and has been working with MAPPER engineers at Fab 12 to integrate electron beam direct write capabilities into manufacturing processes for development of future technology nodes.

"TSMC is always searching for the most cost effective manufacturing processes," says Dr. Shang-Yi Chiang, TSMC Senior Vice President of Research & Development. "The results coming from our project with MAPPER have met aggressive objectives and mark a significant achievement in our Multiple-E-Beam Direct Write program that covers all viable Multiple-E-Beam technologies. Based on these encouraging results, we are convinced that the Multiple E-Beam technology is one of the technologies to become the future lithography standard."

Dr. Christopher Hegarty, MAPPER's CEO adds, "Having TSMC as our launch customer is of great benefit to MAPPER. Now that we have an operational tool at TSMC and we simultaneously intensify our efforts in bringing MAPPER's technology to market, we are supremely confident that electron beam direct write will be successfully introduced into high-volume manufacturing processes."

TSMC and MAPPER will present their latest results at the SPIE Advanced Lithography 2010 conference in San Jose, CA.

Over the time e-beam may become the best choice for small quantity chip manufacturing.