Maskless lithography technology has taken another important step

In the previous article "Kill MASK, They Are on the Road" in the semiconductor industry observation, we introduced the prospects of maskless lithography technology
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And recently, another company announced its progress in this area
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? EV Group (EVG) has introduced Lithoscale, a maskless lithography system for high-volume production (HVM).
Compared with the existing maskless exposure system, its throughput has increased by 5 times
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? Austrian group provides wafer bonding and lithography equipment for MEMS, nanotechnology and semiconductor markets
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The lithography system is the first to use EVG's MLE (Maskless Exposure) solid-state laser technology
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? Lithoscale is developed for applications that require a high degree of flexibility or product changes, including advanced packaging, MEMS, biomedical and IC substrate manufacturing
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It combines a resolution below 2μm and is not limited by the exposure field, digital processing for real-time data transmission and instant exposure, and a highly scalable design
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? Capable of generating stitch-free patterns for interposers whose sizes exceed the current markings.
This is particularly useful for advanced graphics processing, artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC), which have a strong demand for complex layouts.

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It also uses dynamic alignment mode and die-level compensation with autofocus to adapt to substrate material and surface changes and maintain the best coverage performance
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LITHOSCALE can accommodate substrates of various sizes and shapes, wafers with a maximum diameter of 300 mm, and rectangular substrates up to a quarter panel, as well as different substrates and resist materials
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Paul Lindner, Executive Technical Director of EV Group, said: “Lithoscale is a major achievement of EVG.
It firmly establishes our leadership in lithography technology and opens the door to new opportunities for digital lithography.

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"It was designed from the beginning to be a highly flexible and extensible platform, which enables high-volume equipment manufacturers to finally realize the benefits of digital lithography
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Demonstrations with our customers and partners show that the range of applications that can benefit from Lithoscale is wide and growing every day
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"The specific shipments of products will begin later this year
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3D integration and heterogeneous integration are critical to achieving continuous improvement in the performance of semiconductor devices
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This has led to an increase in packaging complexity and the number of available packaging options, which in turn promotes The need for greater design flexibility and the ability to simultaneously adopt die-level and wafer-level designs in back-end lithography
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? Due to its complex product portfolio, MEMS manufacturing also brings challenges to lithography.
Increasing the cost of mask/reticle manufacturing
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In the IC substrate and biomedical market, the demand for a higher degree of pattern flexibility to address various features and substrate sizes is growing
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Rapid prototyping is also changing in biotechnology applications More and more important, thereby driving the demand for more flexible, scalable, and “ready to use” lithography methods
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? Traditional mask-based lithography solutions are not suitable for many of these applications, especially those that require fast Prototyping and testing new product designs or applications of highly customized solutions.
In these applications, the cost and time required to manufacture, test, and rework a large number of masks may add up quickly
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In addition, for advanced packaging, the current Some back-end lithography systems face the problems of nonlinearity, high-order substrate distortion, and chip shift-related problems, especially after reconfiguring chips on the wafer in fan-out wafer-level packaging (FOWLP)
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At the same time, the existing maskless lithography methods cannot provide the combination of speed, resolution and ease of use required by the HVM environment
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? Maskless methods eliminate mask-related consumables, while tunable solid-state laser exposure The source is designed to achieve high redundancy and long-life stability, with almost no maintenance or recalibration
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? Digital processing can realize real-time data transmission and instant exposure, thereby avoiding the setup time of each digital mask layout required by other maskless lithography systems
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The system is capable of individual die processing, and rapid full-field positioning and dynamic alignment can provide high scalability for substrates of various sizes and shapes
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