Obducat’s new Sindre™ NIL system (Photo: Obducat)

Feb. 6, 2007 — Obducat, a supplier of lithography solutions based on Nano Imprint Lithography and E-beam lithography, launched Sindre™, its high volume manufacturing system for Nanoimprint Lithography (NIL) to an invited audience numbering more than 200 attendees.

Obducat, which claims a 40% share of the global installed base of NIL systems, believes the Sindre™ system offers a manufacturing level solution to producers of consumer products such as cameras, mobile phones, palmtops, flat screens and next generation hard disk drives as well as optical storage media like HD-DVD and Blu-ray, many of which already employ NIL with research level tools from Obducat.

Obducat’s solution is based on two key technologies developed by Obducat. IPS™ the inversion of a hard master into an Intermediate Polymer Stamp (used once for imprinting and then discarded). This limits contamination risk and increases master life-time. STU™, Simultaneously combined UV and Thermal NIL, allowing the complete imprint sequence to be performed at a constant temperature.

The company states that the Sindre™ system is able to imprint 30 wafers per hour up to 8-inch diameter substrates and subsequent model will be capable of up to 90 wafers per hour.

Obducat’s CTO, Babak Heidari, demonstrating the Sindre system for Jim Wang, NanoOpto (Photo: Obducat)

Japanese technology leader Canon Marketing Japan signed an exclusive distribution agreement with Obducat this week.

Hiroshi Shibuya, Senior Managing Director of Canon marketing, Japan, said: “Canon has identified the Nano imprint market as a very interesting future area of growth. We have high expectations for our new cooperation and we believe that Obducat’s expertise in Nano imprint will bring new and innovative solutions to the Japanese market.”

“Distribution is the key to our market,” said Frédéric Hervier, Marketing and Sales Director at Obducat. “Asia is a very important market and together with Canon we can better penetrate the vast potential of the Japanese market.

Obducat states that it currently supplies its Nano Imprint Lithography (NIL) and Electron Beam recorder (EBR) technology to Samsung, Thomson, GE Plastics, Fujitsu, Dai Nippon Printing and others. Obducat has 200 ongoing patents related to its NIL and E-beam technologies.