INDUSTRY NEWS

Ball exposes IC breakthrough

Ball Semiconductor says it took another major step toward its mission of developing the technology to make the world's first semiconductors on a 1-mm sphere. Using a proprietary lithographic process, the company has imprinted a metal IC pattern on the surface of a silicon sphere. The lithographic process involved sphere alignment, mask design, and mirror design. The company says it developed an algorithm to transfer two-dimensional mask patterns onto the surface of the three-dimensional sphere, demonstrating the capability of the lithography system. The mask data were transferred to a multifaceted mirror which regenerated the pattern and exposed more than 70% of the 1-mm silicon sphere "in one shot," Ball says.

Device production on silicon spheres could reduce semiconductor manufacturing costs by up to 90%, primarily through the use of hermetically sealed tubes instead of cleanrooms, according to Ball. Furthermore, the process cycle would be days instead of months, the company insists. With the latest announcement, Ball asserts it has proven the effectiveness of four of the five "critical components" needed to produce the breakthrough devices. The four successful enabling technologies are spherical lithography, no-contact processing, spherical single crystallization, and three-dimensional design. The unproved one is VLSI by clustering.

Vendors team on defects

Leica Microsystems and Applied Materials have joined forces to offer semiconductor industry clients a range of demonstration systems for detecting, analyzing, and classifying wafer defects. Leica will install its most advanced optical defect-review station at Applied Materials' process diagnostics and control (PDC) facilities in Santa Clara, CA, and Narita, Japan, to give customers access to demonstration of combined systems. Israel Niv, vice president of marketing for Applied's PDC group, calls the Leica INS 3000 tool "an excellent complement to our wafer inspection and defect review SEM products." The tool will be linked with Applied's SEMVision defect-review SEM and WF-736 DUO systems. Applied has incorporated Leica technology in its WF-736 DUO defect inspection systems during a collaboration of several years.

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