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CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Aug. 2, 2004 – In every sense of the phrase, LumArray Inc. wants to rip the mask off the world of photolithography. Launched only this summer, the latest startup from MIT has a new technology to fire beams of light through a mosaic of micro-machined lenses onto a substrate.
Known as zone-plate array lithography, the technique lets engineers carve a microchip design directly onto silicon — omitting the need for a “mask,” the costly middle step of focusing light through a glass sheet with the design etched onto it.
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LumArray now hopes that its maskless approach will take a look at the semiconductor market and show how many companies might build new devices (or at least attempt new projects) if they had a less expensive way to try out new chip designs.
“We’re more fulfilling the needs of niche markets… The guy who wants 1 million chips will always want” a conventional lithography mask, LumArray co-founder David Michaud said.
In contrast, he added that zone-array lithography “is for someone who doesn’t need a fast machine, but a cheap machine.”
Masks are the bane of the chip engineer’ existence. They routinely cost several million dollars to design, take months to build, and must be absolutely flawless before chips go into production. In fact, the high price is fine for a large manufacturer ready to pound out chips by the million. But the high stakes can easily quash a small project when only a few hundred prototype chips are needed.
“It has become a very important issue, due to the complexity of what everyone wants to do,” said Cary Snyder, chief analyst with SemiView Inc.
Zone-plate lithography (abbreviated as ZPAL) works by replacing the single mask with thousands of micro-machined lenses. A laser is split into myriad beams directed by micro-mirrors, each beam focused through an individual lens. The lenses each carve a portion of the design onto the substrate, and the whole pattern quickly emerges.
The concept itself is not new. The challenges for LumArray were to develop a way to fabricate the micro-lenses (each about 100 microns wide, and as many as 10,000 devoted to a single chip design), and to control that orchestra of mirrors in a single, easy-to-use computer interface as they move at high speeds. The more complex the design, the more data-intensive is the chore of telling each mirror exactly where and when to direct its laser beam.
“It’s a very ‘engineering’ problem,” says Rajesh Menon, the MIT researcher who developed ZPAL technology with professor Henry Smith. “These are mundane engineering tasks, but they’re not necessarily easy… it’s the timing of it all that’s very important.”
At the moment, LumArray has a proof-of-concept machine that can carve chip features down to 150 nanometers. The company expects to have its first model ready for the market in about 18 months; the device should be about the size of a laser printer and could hone features down to about 100 nanometers.
A second-generation version, still two years away at the earliest, should be able to etch features at 45 nanometers or even smaller. Each group of lenses is “tuned” to a particular frequency of light, but the technology can work with various frequencies. High-frequency X-rays, for example, would create more precise features.
LumArray has only eight employees now, most of them co-founders who met at MIT, although it is trying to line up a management team. Beck says a few venture capital firms have expressed interest in the company. Meanwhile it is trying to secure government research grants as well.
Of course, the company has competition as well. ASML Corp., for example, is trying to develop maskless lithography with one large lens rather than many small ones.
eASIC Inc. and ChipX Corp. both tout e-beam lithography as another maskless alternative. (E-beam lithography fires only one beam, where ZPAL fires many — meaning e-beam features can be more precise, but production time is much slower.)
Snyder warned that this market is still miniscule today.
“There is going to be more of that natural selection,” he says. The real opportunity will arise several years from now when one technology emerges as the standard. “That’s where someone can commercialize what has been an R&D concept.”
Company
LumArray
History
LumArray originated as an MIT spinoff, using technology developed at the university’s Nanostructures Laboratory.
Industries potentially served
Semiconductors
Small tech-related products and services
LumArray has developed maskless zone-plate-array lithography (ZPAL), a technology that allows for the direct etching of computer-designed microchip patterns onto silicon. The comparatively inexpensive system makes it possible for companies to create several hundred prototype chips without the capital equipment expenditure associated with larger manufacturing runs. The company has developed a software interface for controlling up to 10,000 micro-lenses that function as substitutes for a traditional mask.
Management
David Michaud: co-founder
Hank Smith: co-founder
Nicholas Economou: acting chief executive officer
Financials
LumArray has a Phase 1 SBIR contract with DARPA.
Selected competitors
A competing maskless technology, e-beam lithography, offers customers more precise etching, although ZPAL is a great deal faster. ZPAL also has the added benefit of being usable in a biotech environment. Companies offering e-beam lithography equipment include:
JEOL (distributor)
Barriers to market
LumArray’s technology will not necessarily aid the customer who is working at high levels of speedy production. Rather, the company targets customers seeking less expensive machinery to complete smaller lithography tasks.
Contact
Email: [email protected]
Research by Gretchen McNeely