Not All RETs Are Created Equal

摘要

As linewidths continue to scale, the industry continually evaluates how best to get the sizes and performance need-ed. Reducing the wavelength of light — whether through tricks like immersion lithography or through source changes like EUV lithography — is one way to get there, but chipmakers will first try to get everything they can out of their existing photol ithography tools. Freescale Semiconductor (Austin, Texas) and Photronics Inc. (Brookfield, Conn.) announced recently some results from their ongoing joint research into resolution enhancement techniques (RETs), which let users get more out of conventional tools than they would with standard binary masks. The chip-maker and maskmaker have been working together for close to two years, with a formal agreement in place since December 2004, to jointly explore the various approaches for preparing leading-edge reticles for 65 nm and below semiconductor manufacturing.