Maskless lithography system for high-volume manufacturing
The EV Group (EVG) has launched a maskless lithography system for high-volume manufacturing (HVM) with a 5x increase in throughput compared to existing maskless exposure systems.
The Austrian group supplies wafer bonding and lithography equipment for the MEMS, nanotechnology, and semiconductor markets. The Lithoscale system is the first to use EVG’s MLE (Maskless Exposure) solid state laser technology.
Lithoscale was developed for applications requiring a high degree of flexibility or product variation, including advanced packaging, MEMS, biomedical and IC substrate manufacturing. It combines a resolution under 2μm with no exposure field limitations, digital processing for real-time data transfer and immediate exposure, and a highly scalable design.
The ability to generate a stitch-free pattern for interposers exceeding current reticle sizes is especially useful for advanced devices with complex layouts needed for advanced graphics processing, artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC). It also uses dynamic alignment modes and die-level compensation with automatic focus to adapt to substrate material and surface variations and maintain optimal overlay performance. LITHOSCALE accommodates a variety of substrate sizes and shapes, up to 300-mm-diameter wafers as well as rectangular substrates up to quarter panels, as well as different substrate and resist materials.
“Lithoscale is a major achievement for EVG and firmly establishes our technical leadership in lithography while opening the door to a new world of opportunities for digital lithography,” stated Paul Lindner, executive technology director at EV Group. “It has been designed from the ground up to be a highly flexible and scalable platform, which enables high-volume device manufacturers to finally realize the benefits of digital lithography. Demonstrations with our customers and partners have shown that the applications that can benefit from Lithoscale are wide ranging and growing by the day.”
Shipments will start later this year.
Next: Maskless lithography
3D integration and heterogeneous integration are increasingly critical to enabling continuous improvements in semiconductor device performance. This had led to an increase in package complexity as well as in the number of package options available — driving the need for greater design flexibility and the ability to adopt both die- and wafer-level designs simultaneously in back-end lithography.
MEMS manufacturing also poses challenges for lithography due to its complex product mix, which drives up mask/reticle overhead costs. In the IC substrate and biomedical markets, demand is growing for a higher degree of patterning flexibility to address a wide range of feature and substrate sizes. Rapid prototyping is also becoming more important in biotech applications, driving the need for more flexible, scalable and “ready-to-go” lithography approaches.
Traditional mask-based lithography solutions are not practical for many of these applications, especially those requiring fast prototyping and testing of new product designs or highly customized solutions, where the cost and time needed for producing, testing and reworking a large volume of mask sets can quickly add up. Additionally, for advanced packaging, existing back-end lithography systems face difficulties with nonlinear, high-order substrate distortions and die-shift-related issues, especially after die reconstitution on the wafer in fan-out wafer-level packaging (FOWLP). At the same time, existing maskless lithography approaches do not offer the combination of speed, resolution and ease of use necessary for HVM environments.
The mask-free approach eliminates mask-related consumables, while the tunable solid-state laser exposure source is designed for high redundancy and long life-time stability with virtually no maintenance and no re-calibration required.
The digital processing enables real-time data transfer and immediate exposure, avoiding hours of setup time for each digital mask layout as needed by other maskless lithography systems. The system is capable of individual die processing, while fast full-field positioning and dynamic alignment enable high scalability for a range of substrate sizes and shapes.
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