Maskless Lithography - Future of Maskless Lithography

Future of Maskless Lithography

Maskless lithography is already used for the production of photomasks and in limited wafer-level production. There are some obstacles ahead of its use in high-volume manufacturing. First, there is a wide diversity of maskless techniques. Even within the electron-beam category, there are several vendors (Mapper Lithography, Canon, Advantest) with entirely different architectures and beam energies. Second, throughput targets exceeding 10 wafers per hour still need to be met. Third, the capacity and ability to handle the large data volume (Tb-scale) needs to be developed and demonstrated.

In recent years DARPA and NIST have reduced support for maskless lithography in the U.S.

There is a new European program that will push the insertion of maskless lithography for IC manufacturing at the 32-nm half-pitch node in 2009. Project name was MAGIC, or “MAskless lithoGraphy for IC manufacturing,” in frame of EC 7th Framework Programme (FP7).