The effort that Chinese lithography equipment is making to develop their own avant-garde machines is titanic. And, as expected, the Xi Jinping government is supporting these companies with multimillionaire subsidies. In fact, at the beginning of September 2023, it approved a game of no less than $41 billion allocated precisely to the companies that produce the equipment involved in the manufacture of integrated circuits .
One of these companies is Pulin Technology . This Chinese organization has opted, like Naura Technology, Amec ( Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Inc. China ), or Piotech Inc., for developing their own avant-garde photolithography machines. The achievements are getting little by little. The recent signing by Pulin is impressive because, according to Digitimes Asia, it has sent one of its customers its first avant-garde team using nano-impression lithography technology (known as NIL by its English denomination, Nanoimprint Lithography ).
On paper, this machine is an alternative to ASML UVE equipment
We still do not know in detail the characteristics of the new lithography equipment developed by Pulin, but it doesn’t matter. In reality, NIL technology is not new. The Japanese Canon company has had its own commercial solution for years, and presumably, its principles of operation are essentially similar to those of the machine designed by Pulin. Canon began working on Lithography NIL in 2004 . Thirteen years later, in 2017 , it delivered the FPA-1200NZ2C machine, its first functional NIL machine, to Toshiba to be installed in its Yokkaichi memory chips production plant in Japan.
Pulin Technology has sent one of its customers its first avant-garde team using nano-impression lithography technology.
On paper, NIL photolithography equipment is an alternative to extreme ultraviolet lithography machines (UVE) that the Dutch company ASML designs and manufactures, although not to the highest opening version of these machines. The latter are currently the most sophisticated and expensive that exist. In this article, we do not need to delve into the foundations of NIL lithography, but we are interested in the knowledge that its integrated circuit manufacturing strategy is different from that used by the UVE and UVP lithography equipment ( deep ultraviolet ).
Very broadly, the production of silicon wafers in the latter requires transporting the geometric pattern described by the mask to the surface of the silicon wafer using ultraviolet light and extremely refined optical elements . NIL lithography, however, allows the pattern to be transferred to the wafer without the need for an extremely complex optical system to intervene in the process. This strategy is simpler and more economical, but it also entails the execution of several sequential processes that make it slower than UVE and UVP lithography.
Canon ensures that their nano-impression lithography equipment can be used to manufacture integrated circuits comparable to 5 nm chips that TSMC, Samsung, or Intel produce with ASML UVE machines. In the future, with the refinements that will arrive, they can manufacture 2 nm chips . However, this is not all. Besides, according to Fujio Mitarai, General Director of Canon, a NIL machine costs ten times less than an ASML UVE machine: $15 million compared to the $150 million requested by the Dutch company for a UVE machine with a numerical opening of 0.33 . We still do not know how much each Pulin NIL machine will cost, but it is reasonable to anticipate that at most, it will have a cost comparable to that of the Canon machine.
For further information, visit Digitimes Asia.
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