New immersion scanner for Double Patterning mass production Start of Sales for Nikon ArF immersion Scanner NSR-S620

Nikon Corporation (Michio Kariya, President) announced they will release the NSR-S620 ArF immersion scanner for mass production process utilizing Double Patterning^* to their customers in the 4th quarter of 2009. By further improving the Nikon's immersion technology of Local Fill nozzle and the Tandem Stage and mounting them on the epoch-making platform which provides both high precision and high throughput, the NSR-S620 will fulfill the customers' requirement in the mass production process using Double Pattering technology.

• *In Double Patterning, a single, dense circuit pattern is split into two coarser patterns that can be printed separately with current immersion technology. By combining the two exposure results on the wafer, the final, dense circuit pattern is achieved.

VLSI chips are becoming ever denser and immersion lithography is now well established as the leading edge technology for 40-45 nm node volume manufacturing. At the 32 nm node, Double Patterning is the leading technology contender. In Double Patterning, the key challenges for the exposure tool are the substantial improvement overlay accuracy and throughput for mass production process. The NSR-S620 will provide the customers with efficient solution for Double Patterning satisfying such stringent requirement.