February 27, 2007 – At this week’s SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium, Luminescent Technologies claims to have data showing customers using its inverse lithography technology (ILT) in 45nm and 32nm development efforts. The company is touting ILT as an alternative to optical proximity correction (OPC), offering better pattern fidelity and broader lithography process windows.

Among the benchmarks Luminescent says its customers have achieved include solving end-line shortening problems in the poly and diffusion layers at 45nm; improving depth-of-focus by at least 100nm (<30% vs. conventional technologies); and equal or better write times than conventional OPC. Further, ILT is enabling users to develop recipes in days instead of weeks required by conventional OPC, the company stated.

“From the outset, ILT showed tremendous promise as the most intuitive, practical and optimal mask synthesis solution,” said Luminescent CEO David Fried, in a statement. He noted that the company’s ILT technology is patterning features at leading-edge nodes beyond OPC’s capabilities, adding that customers “are most excited by ILT’s potential to enable the use of more-economical 193-nm dry lithography instead of immersion for printing certain 45nm critical layers.”

Luminescent, a Palo Alto, CA-based venture capital-backed company started in 2002, says its products are installed at five semiconductor sites, with two orders recently received for its full-chip Luminizer product.