Toshiba and SK team up on Nano Impring Lithography development

Engineers from both companies will jointly start development of basic technologies for the process at Toshiba’s Yokohama complex in April this year, aiming for practical use in 2017. Toshiba has worked with several equipment and materials companies on NIL, integrating their technologies with Toshiba’s semiconductor manufacturing process. The newly announced joint development program with SK Hynix aims accelerate progress towards practical use and will mitigate burden of Toshiba’s investment into NIL development. NIL is one of candidate technologies for advancing the migration to future generations of memory devices. Photolithography, the current mainstream process technology, uses a laser and photosensitive mask to etch circuits on a light-sensitive coating on semiconductor wafers. NIL transfers the circuit design directly, by impressing a patterned template onto the wafer. This has the potential to achieve finer designs.