Ahead-looking: Canon is famend for its printers, cameras, and different imaging merchandise designed for each client and industrial use. The Japanese firm is now making use of its in depth information in optical and imaging applied sciences to enterprise into the extremely specialised subject of superior chip manufacturing gear.
Canon just lately launched the FPA-1200NZ2C, a chunk of “nanoimprint semiconductor manufacturing” gear particularly designed for producing microchips and different semiconductor-based elements utilizing the most recent manufacturing nodes out there. Canon’s resolution for chip manufacturing seems to supply comparable capabilities to its rivals however does so with considerably decrease energy consumption, due to its utilization of nanoimprint expertise.
Not like conventional photolithography methods, nanoimprint lithography (NIL) doesn’t depend on an optical mechanism to switch a circuit sample onto the resist-coated wafer. Canon’s NIL equipment achieves the identical end result by urgent a masks imprinted with the circuit sample onto the wafer’s resist, primarily performing like a stamp, as described by the corporate.
The FPA-1200NZ2C can deal with patterning workloads with a minimal linewidth of 14 nm, a functionality that Canon states is akin to the 5nm manufacturing node obligatory for producing as we speak’s “most superior logic semiconductors.” Canon anticipates that, with continued enhancements in masks expertise, the NIL approach is poised to succeed in a minimal linewidth of 10 nm (equal to a 2nm node).
The brand new FPA-1200NZ2C system can be geared up with progressive environmental management expertise designed to reduce wonderful particle contamination. Because it does not require a “particular” gentle supply like excessive ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, Canon’s NIL resolution is notably energy-efficient and may considerably scale back energy consumption, thereby contributing to CO2 discount.
The FPA-1200NZ2C is able to manufacturing complicated semiconductor circuits with an growing variety of defect-free layers, due to the aforementioned wonderful particle management expertise. Canon states that this equipment will be utilized for a variety of purposes, together with metalenses for prolonged actuality (XR) units with microstructures within the tens of nanometers, in addition to logic circuits in CPUs and varied different semiconductor units.
Nanoimprint lithography is a method that has been in existence for over 20 years, as famous by Pranay Kotasthane, the chairperson of the Takshashila Establishment, in an interview with CNBC. Nonetheless, the expertise failed to achieve vital traction, primarily as a result of excessive ultraviolet (EUV) machines produced by the Dutch firm ASML delivered superior outcomes for extremely refined chip merchandise. Canon, which has been creating its NIL expertise since 2004, is now banking on the concept that this “cheaper” resolution is “ok” for producing superior microchips independently.