JMAR Awarded $13 Million DARPA Contract

Staff -- Semiconductor International, 10/1/1998

J MAR Technologies (San Diego, Calif.) recently received a $13 million contract from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL, Adelphi, Md.), sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, Arlington, Va.), to advance further development of its PXS laser plasma X-ray source for advanced semiconductor lithography applications. The primary goal of the contract is to produce and deliver a point-source X-ray lithography system capable of supporting production rates of up to 24 300 µm wafers per hour. A major milestone in this program will be integrating JMAR's PXS into a mask-to-wafer alignment system, or aligner/stepper. Together, these devices are to form a point-source lithography workstation.

Presently, there are two methods for producing X-rays used in lithography. The first uses synchrotrons, because they are large and immobile. The second method is a point source such as PXS, designed to supply X-rays to a single stepper. It uses an all solid state laser to pump a target to get the X-rays.

"To date, much of the industry's reluctance to adopt X-ray lithography on a large scale appears to be centered on the high cost and time required to modify current factory designs to accommodate synchrotrons," said Richard M. Foster, president of JMAR Research. "JMAR's PXS is designed specifically to overcome these issues. We believe that, when fully developed, it will provide the basis for a cost-effective lithography system, no larger than today's optical lithography stations, with the means to produce circuit features of 0.13 microns and much smaller."

The contract includes a previously announced $2.3 million advanced by ARL to JMAR earlier this year. The complete contract consists of nine major tasks and spans a minimum of two fiscal years.