The company that gave the world the means to watch the moon landing, World Cup soccer, and The Simpsons has entered the wafer and photomask inspection business. Sarnoff Corp. has introduced a tool that weds UV light and a high-speed charged-coupled device to enable deep-submicron inspection. Founded in 1942 as RCA Laboratories, the company was renamed in 1951 in honor of its late chairman and television pioneer, David Sarnoff.

Launched in May at Pittcon, the new CCD camera technology for UV inspection operates at 100 to 1000 full frames per second, depending on the light level and the inspection requirements. The system will first be used to inspect photomasks, which are growing in complexity as chipmakers adopt phase shifting and other optical tricks to make next-generation ICs.

The visible spectrum is ineffective for inspection as transistors multiply and geometries drop deep into the nanometer nether regions, Sarnoff says. "Visible light was fine when we had millions of transistors on each chip, but today we're seeing hundreds of millions," notes Frank Pantuso, the director of Sarnoff's Optoelectronics and Integrated Circuit Systems business. The much shorter wavelength of UV light "is much better for deep-submicron work." The camera is capable of inspecting "every single line" and finding defects on both masks and wafers at high throughputs, he says.

Sarnoff is selling its CCD tool under its own name to OEMs as subassemblies. The company that developed color TV views the use of UV light as the next step in the evolution of nanotech, Pantuso says.