Brion, Hitachi High-Technologies Collaborate on Common DFM Platform.

New Platform Will Help Customers Better Manage Lithography "Hot Spots," Saving Time, Money in Sub-65nm Device Production

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Brion Technologies and Hitachi High-Technologies (HHT) today announced that the two companies are collaborating on a design for manufacturing (DFM) platform that allows chipmakers to detect, measure and monitor optical proximity correction (OPC) defects during volume production of advanced semiconductors. The teaming of the companies brings together two market-winning technologies - Brion's lithography design verification and HHT's scanning electron microscope (SEM) metrology - in a platform that will significantly advance the state of DFM for customers.

Brion and HHT, the world's largest supplier of scanning electron microscopes for critical dimension (CD) measurement, are working with a joint customer, a large semiconductor manufacturer, to develop a common interface that works with Brion's Tachyon[TM] lithography simulation and design inspection tool and HHT's new DesignGauge CD-SEM system.

The interface Brion and HHT are developing will allow OPC "hot spots" detected by Brion's Tachyon lithography design verification products to be measured and monitored by HHT's DesignGauge CD-SEM metrology system. A key element of the interface is Tachyon's HotSpot Report[TM], which provides defect location, classification, and grouping information to drive HHT's DesignGauge metrology system. DesignGauge fully automates arbitrary SEM metrology on a large number of sampling sites; combined with the Tachyon interface, the system vastly reduces the amount of time and number of operations required to generate a several-hundred point CD-SEM recipe for OPC evaluation.

The two systems are already complementary technologies. Tachyon depends on accurate CD measurements - provided by a SEM - to perform accurate design verification, while DesignGauge uses Tachyon output to automate recipe generation for and control of SEM wafer observations. This, in turn, eliminates the need for the typically lengthy, labor-intensive and potentially error-prone manual set up of a SEM metrology recipe.

"To calibrate Tachyon, one needs to have the most accurate CD measurements possible; this impacts how the process model is built and ultimately the design's verification," said Jun Kanamori of Hitachi High-Technologies. "So an efficient interface between model construction and CD measurements is extremely useful. And after Tachyon has identified hot spots in a design, they can be verified with the SEM for closed-loop control of design and manufacturing."

"We're excited to be working with Hitachi High-Technologies on this common platform," said Eric Chen, chief executive office of Brion. "The development of a common interface for Tachyon and DesignGauge is only a first step in our collaboration. In addition to offering our respective customers systems that use this interface, we plan to continue evaluating more ways to take advantage of the synergies between our technologies."

Dedicated to the demanding tasks of lithography modeling and database handling, Tachyon represents a new and unprecedented approach to computational lithography simulation. Unlike conventional edge-based sampling methods, Tachyon uses a hybrid computational lithography architecture that combines image-based lithography process simulation and polygon-based data manipulation to simulate and inspect 100 percent of the chip area. The Tachyon platform delivers extremely accurate verification results without compromising cycle time, accelerating time-to-market for chip manufacturers by enabling full-chip resolution enhancement technology (RET) and OPC verification in a matter of hours (compared to days for competing systems) based on its hardware-accelerated co-processing system.

Since the Tachyon platform first shipped in 2003, the platform has continued to gain broad-based adoption at chip companies around the globe. To date, thousands of production circuit layers have been processed by Tachyon systems worldwide.

About Hitachi High-Technologies

Hitachi High-Technologies offers a wide breadth of product and service offerings, including: semiconductor manufacturing equipment, analytical instrumentation, scientific instruments, bio-related products, industrial equipment, information equipment, electronic devices, and electronic and industrial materials.

About Brion Technologies

Brion Technologies, Inc. is the pioneer and leader in Lithography-Driven Design and Manufacturing[TM]. Founded in 2002, the privately held company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Brion's Tachyon[TM] platform, a highly accurate and ultra-fast OPC and OPC verification engine, enables a unique set of capabilities that address the interrelated challenges of design, photomask making and wafer printing in semiconductor lithography. With more than 125 employees, the company leads the worldwide market for optical proximity correction (OPC) verification, and is rapidly expanding in the OPC market. For further information, visit Brion Technologies' Web site at www.brion.com or call [phone].

Lithography-Driven Design & Manufacturing and Tachyon are trademarks of Brion Technologies, Inc.