Europe’s newest pilot fabrication line is being used to pressure-test a patterning idea that could let chipmakers add density without stacking more lithography passes.
The company behind the experiment is AlixLabs, a Swedish outfit. Its method goes by Atomic Pitch Splitting. The host is imec, which runs the NanoIC facility as a place to move novel process ideas toward industrial qualification.
The technique leans on atomic layer etching. A single pre-patterned feature is carved into two, so the number of lines on a wafer roughly doubles. Its selling point is fewer steps than the multi-pass routes used at leading-edge nodes, which depend on repeated deposition, etch and alignment cycles.
Work starts on small coupon pieces before promising conditions move onto whole wafers. Imec first builds the starting line-and-space structures and hands them over; the finished wafers come back so results can be checked against its own reference methods.
The two sides will judge the process on the things that matter in production, from how evenly features size up across a wafer to edge roughness, profile control and random defects. Putting the idea through that range of testing is the point of the exercise.
AlixLabs chief executive Jonas Sundqvist said the collaboration lets his team gather data through imec’s metrology and process discipline, a useful step in showing where the method belongs in advanced patterning. Customers weighing the technology, he said, had asked for validation on a line like this one.
The company eventually wants to sell its Sax Forma platform into high-volume fabs.
