Motorola Fabricates Extreme Ultra Violet Photomasks

Increasingly smaller devices require increasingly smaller ICs. Better, smaller, faster, and more powerful. It seems like Motorola is always announcing one breakthrough or another, and whether its related to something we'll see in the near future or something that requires a decade of work, these developments and discoveries are almost always interesting. Last week, the company announced that its researchers have fabricated the first extreme ultra violet (EUV) photomasks, which are intended to be used in the manufacture of sub-micron integrated circuits with feature sizes below 100 nanometers. The photomasks were built with a complex integrated circuit design layout on an emerging photomask format for EUV lithography. EUV masks use a reflective multi-layer mask blank upon which a very thin absorbing material is patterned to create the image. According to Motorola, researchers have demonstrated a mask patterning process suitable for current industry-standard format (six" square, 0.25" thick substrates) masks by using an extension of tools that support processing of round silicon wafers. Motorola expects development of EUV mask technology to provide early learning by having masks available to print smaller feature sizes on integrated circuits in early 2002 using a prototype EUV exposure tool. EUV exposure tools for manufacturing are expected to be available by 2005. That's right around the corner.