CEA-Leti has announced the inclusion of Synopsys as an industrial partner in the IMAGINE program designed for the development of maskless lithography for the production of integrated circuits (ICs).
Synopsys is the 10th partner joining the IMAGINE program. MAPPER Lithography and CEA-Leti started the program in July 2009 and MAPPER delivered its massively parallel electron beam platform to Leti for the program. The IMAGINE program is developed on the basis of the core technology, MAPPER platform.
The IMAGINE program offers the opportunity to key chip producers to evaluate the maskless lithography technology in an actual production environment. Moreover, it will design and fulfill the entire infrastructure, from preparation of data to integration of process, as part of its efforts for its industrial launch in 2015.
CEA-Leti Program Manager, Serge Tedesco stated that the ML2 technology’s ability to deal with huge data files is one of the important points and CEA-Leti will require to rapidly launch the suitable data format standard.
Fabio Angelillis, who serves as Vice President Engineering at Synopsys’ Silicon Engineering Group, maskless lithography has developed as a candidate for advancing IC production to technology nodes less than 15 nm. The IMAGINE program assembles leaders from all fields of IC production in the evaluation and application of this technology, he said. Synopsys is happy to deliver its pioneering technology in mask tools such as mask data preparation and mask synthesis to coerce efficient software solutions for the IMAGINE program, he added.
Source: http://www.leti.fr