ORA Wins $1.7 Million ATP Award for Advanced Lithography Modeling
May 2004 -The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has awarded Optical Research Associates (ORA ® ), Pasadena, CA, a $1.7 Million Advanced Technology Program (ATP) award for the development of advanced lithography modeling algorithms. The ATP, which selects recipients through an annual award cycle, provides cost-shared funding to industry for high-risk research and development projects that have the potential to spark important, broad-based economic benefits for the United States.
This prestigious ATP award will fund ORA's “Fundamental Algorithms for Direct Metric Tolerancing and Illumination Optimization” project, which will focus on overcoming technical and modeling limitations in the current generation of software used by industry to design and build semiconductor devices.
ORA's Lithography Algorithms to Increase Semiconductor Manufacturing Yields
Semiconductor manufacturers face pressure to continue trends in increased scaling of integrated circuits and faster, more efficient chip processing. ORA's research will focus on the development of revolutionary algorithms to help the industry meet these challenges, both for technologies under development now and the next-generation extreme ultraviolet (EUV) systems. ORA's approach is two-pronged. First, ORA will develop direct-metric tolerancing and compensator selection for projection optics. If successful, this will allow accurate calculation of optical system performance based directly on key performance metrics during the crucial process of developing the fabrication and assembly tolerances and methods, rather than on derivatives of these metrics (e.g., RMS wavefront error). Accurate calculations of optical errors will help designers maximize the performance of their equipment, effectively boosting manufacturing and product yields and extending the lifetime of a particular technology node. Second, ORA will develop algorithms for optimization of illumination systems in EUV lithography. These new illumination optimization algorithms will help designers collect and shape the output of EUV sources to achieve higher throughput and more uniform illumination at the surface of the wafer, which is essential to achieving commercially viable production rates in terms of wafers per hour. ORA's goal for the EUV illumination optimization algorithms is to improve product throughput or yield at the chip level by 10 to 25 percent.
“We are very pleased to receive this ATP award,” said Robert Hilbert, President and CEO of ORA. “We see this as a great opportunity for ORA to develop advanced modeling techniques that will bridge the gap between semiconductor manufacturing theory and technology. While this project and its goals are extremely challenging, we believe that our development work will provide necessary technical innovations and tools to enable substantial productivity improvements in the semiconductor industry.”
For more details about this project, read the announcement on the ATP Web site.
