The eBeam Initiative, a forum dedicated to the education and promotion of new semiconductor manufacturing approaches based on electron beam (eBeam) technologies, announces the completion of the second annual eBeam Initiative survey. The 28 member companies from across the photomask global supply chain participated in the survey. A majority (86%) of respondents predict that multibeam mask writers will be in production by 2016 to address the critical problem of increasing mask write times–a 12% increase over last year.
Participants provided their opinions on a variety of topics critical to advanced photomask production, including the implementation of multibeam mask writing, mask write times at the 10-nm node, adoption of 8-in. and larger photomasks, the future of EUV lithography, and the adoption of general purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) solutions for simulation-intensive electronic design automation (EDA) applications.
The complete results of the survey were presented on September 10 during the eBeam Initiative’s annual members meeting at the SPIE Photomask Technology Conference in Monterey, Calif. Among the highlights of the survey, an overwhelming majority (86%) of respondents predict that multibeam mask writers will be in production by 2016 to address the critical problem of increasing mask write times–a 12% increase compared to last year’s survey.
Additionally, a strong majority (76%) predict mask critical dimension uniformity (CDU) will be an issue in 2015, with 33% of respondents believing mask data preparation (MDP) will need to take mask CDU into account as early as next year. 75% of respondents also believe that by 2020 some simulation-intensive software applications in EDA will require GPGPUs.
