You already have your first vanguard lithography team

The effort they are making Chinese lithography equipment manufacturers To develop their own avant -garde machines, it is titanic. And, as expected, the Xi Jinping government is supporting these companies with multimillionaire subsidies. In fact, at the beginning of September 2023 he approved a game of no less than 41,000 million dollars Destined precisely to the companies that produce the equipment involved in the manufacture of integrated circuits.

One of these companies is Pulin Technology. This Chinese organization has opted, like Naura Technology, Amec (Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Inc. China) or Piotech Inc., for developing their own avant -garde photolithography machines. And the achievements are getting little by little. The one who has just signed Pulin is impressive because, According to Digitimes Asiahas sent one of its customers its first avant -garde team using nano -impression lithography technology (it is known as NIL by its English denomination Nanoimprint Lithography).

On paper this machine is an alternative to ASML UVE equipment

We still do not know in detail the characteristics of the new lithography team developed by Pulin, but it doesn’t matter. And, in reality, NIL technology is not new. The Japanese Canon company has its own commercial solution for yearsand presumably its principles of operation are in essence the same as those of the machine designed by Pulin. Canon began working in the Nil lithography in 2004. Thirteen years later, in 2017, he delivered the FPA-1200NZ2C team, Your first functional nil machineto Toshiba to be installed in its Yokkaichi memory chips production plant in Japan.

On paper, NIL photolithography equipment is an alternative to the machines of extreme ultraviolet lithography (UVE) that designs and manufactures the Dutch company ASML, although NO TO THE VERSION OF ALTA OPENING of these teams. The latter right now are the most sophisticated and expensive that exist. In this article we do not need to investigate in depth in the foundations of NIL lithography, but we are interested in knowing that its integrated circuit manufacturing strategy is different from that used by the UVE and UVP lithography equipment (deep ultraviolet).

Very broadly the production of silicon wafers in the latter requires transporting the geometric pattern described by the mask to the surface of the silicon wafer using ultraviolet light and extremely refined optical elements. NIL lithography, however, allows the pattern to be transferred to the wafer without the need for an extremely complex optical system to intervene in the process. This strategy is simpler and more economical, but also entails the execution of several sequential processes that make it slower than UVE and UVP lithography.

Canon ensures that their nano -impression lithography equipment can be used to manufacture integrated circuits comparable to 5 Nm chips that TSMC, Samsung or Intel produce with ASML UVE machines. And in the future with the refinements that will arrive They can manufacture 2 nm chips. However, this is not all. Besides, According to Fujio Mitaraigeneral director of Canon, a NIL team costs ten times less than an ASML UVE machine: 15 million dollars compared to the 150 million dollars requested by the Dutch company to its customers for a UVE machine with Numerical Opening 0.33. We still do not know how much each Pulin Nil team will cost, but it is reasonable to anticipate that at most it will have a cost comparable to that of the canon machine.

More information | Digitimes Asia

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