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In semiconductor manufacturing, a mask is sometimes called a reticle. [1] [2] In photolithography, several masks are used in turn, each one reproducing a layer of the completed design, and together known as a mask set. A curvilinear photomask has patterns with curves, which is a departure from conventional photomasks which only have patterns ...
A variety of reticles, each appropriate for one stage in the process, are contained in a rack in the reticle loader, usually located at the upper front of the stepper. Before the wafer is exposed a reticle is loaded onto the reticle stage by a robot, where it is also very precisely aligned. Since the same reticle can be used to expose many ...
The difference between steppers and scanners is that, during exposure, a scanner moves the photomask and the wafer simultaneously, while a stepper only moves the wafer. Contact, proximity and projection Mask aligners preceded steppers [39] [40] and do not move the photomask nor the wafer during exposure and use masks that cover the entire wafer.
[5] [6] There can also be an air curtain or a mesh [9] between the FOUP and the EFEM which helps reduce the amount of humidity that enters the FOUP and improves yield. [10] [11] Companies that manufacture machines used in the industrial semiconductor fabrication process include ASML, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron and Lam Research.
Horizontal (H) and vertical (V) mask (reticle) pattern features are focused differently in EUV optical systems. The numerical aperture (NA) also makes a difference. A fundamental aspect of EUVL tools, resulting from the use of reflective optics, is the off-axis illumination (at an angle of 6°, in different direction at different positions ...
The term tapeout currently is used to describe the creation of the photomask itself from the final approved electronic CAD file. Designers may use this term to refer to the writing of the final file to disk or CD and its subsequent transmission to the semiconductor foundry; however, in current practice the foundry will perform checks and make modifications to the mask design specific to the ...
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In semiconductor fabrication, a resist is a thin layer used to transfer a circuit pattern to the semiconductor substrate which it is deposited upon. A resist can be patterned via lithography to form a (sub)micrometer-scale, temporary mask that protects selected areas of the underlying substrate during subsequent processing steps.