May 10, 2004 — Pasadena, CA — 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, reported the company.

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 US. The awards are made on the basis of a rigorous peer-reviewed selection process.

This 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 research will focus on the development of revolutionary algorithms to help the industry meet new challenges, both for technologies under development now and the next-generation extreme ultraviolet (EUV) systems.

“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,” said Robert Hilbert, President and CEO of ORA. “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.”