One of the main challenges in developing semiconductor chip technology is making electronic components smaller and more effective. This difficulty is most noticeable in lithography, which is the ...

For years the IC industry has worried about a bevy of issues with the photomask. Mask costs are the top concern, but mask complexity, write times and defect inspection are the other key issues for ...

Photolithography involves the selective exposure of a photosensitive material to light, using a UV light source and a collimating optical system to create an image of a patterned mask onto a substrate ...

Photomasks are becoming more complex at each node. In fact, masks are moving from traditional shapes to non-orthogonal patterns and complex shapes, such as curvilinear mask patterns. To measure ...

(Nanowerk News) Recently, researchers from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have proposed a source mask optimization (SMO) technique ...