Imec revolutionises KLA-Tencor's Lithography e-beam tool
Imec has designed and fabricated an electrostatic micro-lens (lenslet) array for KLA-Tencor's anticipated Reflective Electron Beam Lithography (REBL) tool.
The REBL technology potentially enables a high throughput e-beam writing process for maskless lithography. The lenslet array is a key component for the parallelisation of the e-beam writing process. Functionality of the lenslet chip was demonstrated in KLA-Tencor's REBL e-beam column.
The lenslet consists of a densely packed array of 4µm deep cylindrical holes with a 1.4µm diameter and top spacing of only 200nm. The electron beam entering the lenslet holes is focused through a set of 4 ring electrodes.
The ring electrodes can be tuned to focus the electron beams by applying static voltages up to 50V on the ring electrodes. The bottom of each hole consists of a small metal plate that can be switched by a CMOS circuitry below, either reflecting or absorbing the incoming electrons.
In this way, the incoming electron beam is split into 1 million smaller beamlets, a strategy designed to enable higher throughput for the e-beam writing process through parallelisation.
And through its alliances, imec can also offer a path to transfer the technology to a foundry for volume production. The CMORE toolbox contains a wide variety of device technologies on 200mm such as CMOS, Si-photonics, MEMS, specialty image sensors and packaging.
"Many companies can benefit from specialty semiconductor devices to enhance and increase the functionality of their equipment;" states Rudi Cartuyvels, Vice President Smart Systems and Energy Technology at imec. "We are pleased that our semiconductor and heterogeneous integration expertise, and our design and production service, supported the development of KLA-Tencor's REBL tool."
