Brion Delivers 'Accuracy Without Compromise' OPC Solution; Introduces Tachyon OPC+ for Accurate, Fast, Full-Chip Optical Proximity Correction.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Brion Technologies today introduced Tachyon OPC+, an innovative product for implementing optical proximity correction (OPC) on sub-65nm device designs. Tachyon OPC+ is the first tool to give users an exceptionally accurate and predictable method for creating OPC features without sacrificing speed or cost of ownership.

Tachyon OPC+ also marks a significant expansion of Brion's business in the high-growth OPC market. As the pioneer in Lithography-Driven Design & Manufacturing(TM) technologies, Brion is already the market leader in OPC verification. The introduction of Tachyon OPC+ builds on this initial success and marks a major shift in the design-for-manufacturing space, positioning Brion as the first viable alternative in the OPC market in more than a decade.

The new OPC solution is built on Brion's market-winning Tachyon platform, a groundbreaking technology that has seen rapid customer acceptance for its accurate and fast lithography modeling and verification capabilities. Tachyon OPC+ brings this new technology to the critical OPC implementation market, where existing solutions are based on older-generation technology platforms.

"Tachyon OPC+ is a natural extension of our market-winning Tachyon platform, giving customers a clear path to minimizing the OPC error budget and producing better-performing circuits sooner and faster," said Eric Chen, chief executive officer of Brion. "Until now, customers have had to deal with a delicate balance of compromises when producing advanced OPC-enabled circuits, including trading accuracy for speed. Tachyon OPC+ breaks free from these compromises."

Tachyon OPC+ delivers high-quality, accurate OPC features using the company's Focus Exposure Modeling (FEM) technology, an unprecedented one-model, through-process-window, full-chip lithography simulation capability that ensures OPC structures will function as designed.

"Brion's Tachyon OPC+ offers a solution to achieve excellent OPC quality with fast computation and highly predictable cycle time. It improves time-to-result and helps to manage cost of ownership for OPC processes of advanced generations," said Dr. Burn Lin, Senior Director of Micropatterning Technology Division, TSMC.

Unlike conventional OPC solutions, Tachyon OPC+'s processing speed scales linearly with die size. Large, complex devices can now be processed at the same speed per square millimeter as smaller devices, giving users faster-time-to-market and predictable cycle time for customers' production environment. For the first time, computational lithography departments can know beforehand how long an OPC run will take. This eases scheduling and planning, and removes an aspect of significant uncertainty from the IC design-to-manufacturing flow. Tachyon OPC+ also enables users, for the first time, to evaluate and control the process of determining how well modified mask features match the intended features at extremely dense sampling of lithography simulation without the trade-off of cycle time.

The Tachyon platform, noted for its unmatched accuracy and speed for full-chip lithography simulation, is a hybrid architecture that combines the strengths of image-based simulation with the polygon- and contour-based geometry processing used by conventional physical design EDA tools. This hybrid approach enables best-in-class accuracy, comprehensive coverage, predictable run times and flexible user controllability. Since the Tachyon platform first shipped in 2003, thousands of production circuit layers have been processed by Tachyon systems worldwide.

Tachyon OPC+ is currently in beta evaluation and production flow integration at Brion's existing customer base around the world.

About Brion Technologies

Brion Technologies, Inc. is the pioneer and leader in Lithography-Driven Design & 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 data and simulation engine, enables a unique set of capabilities that address the interrelated challenges of design, photomask making and wafer printing in semiconductor microlithography. The company leads the worldwide emerging market of optical proximity correction (OPC) verification, and is expanding its product portfolio. For further information, visit Brion Technologies' Web site at www.brion.com or call 408-653-1500.

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