World’s most advanced Electron Beam Lithography System fully protected by Venner Shipley

This article was taken from the Venner Shipley Newsletter edition 22.

An electron beam lithography system, designed in Cambridge by NanoBeam Ltd (NBL), offers a leap forward in performance, boosting throughput by up to 500%, cutting operating costs by half, whilst matching the resolution of the best on the market. Their nB3 system is about half the cost, and size, of most of the competition and offers a host of other features and advantages.

Not surprisingly, such a major advance needs to be fully protected by patents, worldwide, and the company turned to Venner Shipley’s local office for help.

Traditionally, electron beam lithography systems used in semi-conductor and nanotechnology industries are a significant investment, requiring large and costly clean rooms. The new nB3 system, by contrast, halves the size of clean room required, uses 90% less power and so needs less cooling, has excellent resistance to stray fields and, because of its all-metal construction, is more friendly to clean room conditions

The nB3 is a round-beam, vector-scan system with a unique auto-loading system, using a step-and-repeat method for nano-patterning and its innovative design of electron optics and automation can achieve up to five times the throughput compared with other machines, combined with outstanding reliability, low power consumption and an estimated 95% uptime in operation.

The short column of the nB3 is protected by four patent applications, covering the beam blanker electron gun, the substrate robot handler, the efficient mirror assembly interferometer laser system and the active tracking vibration compensation system. The nB3 guarantees metal-lift-off feature sizes of 20nm and can achieve 10nm scales, with a positioning accuracy of 1nm (about one thousandth of the width of a human hair!).

‘Dr Pawel Piotrowicz at Venner Shipley made the whole patent process very positive,’ says Chief Executive Officer Dr Tao Zhang, ‘because he is qualified in this field himself. Pav wrote all of the specifications and it went through very smoothly ­ he was a tower of strength! As a start-up company, costs were a major consideration and he helped us to spread these through the process.’

‘There is increasing awareness of the importance of protecting intellectual property, particularly in the emerging new technologies and this is where we can help,’ says partner Pawel Piotrowicz.

Pawel Piotrowicz 01 Nov 2007

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