TOKYO, JAPAN - Tokyo Electron Limited (TEL; Head Office: Minato-ku, Tokyo; CEO, President: Tetsuro Higashi), Ebara Corporation (Head Office: Ota-ku, Tokyo; President: Masatoshi Yoda), and Dainippon Screen Mfg. Co., Ltd. (Head Office: Kyoto City, Kyoto Prefecture; Chairman and President: Akira Ishida) announced that they have entered into a memorandum of agreement to found a joint venture company, the purpose of which will be to develop, manufacture, and market a "low energy electron beam direct writing system."

At present, information appliances and other kinds of digital hardware are generating attention the world over. The short product lifecycle of system LSI chips developed and manufactured for use in these devices, however, leads to soaring manufacturing costs of masks for miniaturization, as well as the mask manufacturing lead times, becoming extremely serious issues.

Based on the electron beam direct writing technology developed during many years of research by Toshiba Corporation (Head Office: Minato-ku, Tokyo; President: Tadashi Okamura), this is a mask-less lithography system that pursues quick turnaround time, advantageous to smaller manufacturing operations with a large variety of devices, as seen in system on a chip (SoC) and system LSI chip products.

A major feature of the system is that it will employ both a low energy electron beam method, which is highly effective as a countermeasure against proximity effects, and a character projection method, which uses a circuit block as a single character (fixed pattern) to write that pattern repeatedly. By employing these methods, the system will improve throughput substantially and sizably shorten production lead time.

With this key technology from Toshiba, the joint venture company will also develop related enabling technologies, as well as conduct process verifications, with the aim of going into a full-scale shipment of a system capable of a 65nm resolution by 2005.

Details of the joint venture company are as follows: