Canon finds first customer for nanoimprint tool

Canon will ship a nanoimprint lithography (NIL) system for semiconductor manufacturing to the Texas Institute for Electronics (TIE), a research outfit focusing on advanced heterogeneous integration. The FPA-1200NZ2C will be used for the research and development of advanced semiconductors and the production of prototypes. It’s Canon’s first official sale of the tool.

NIL involves pressing a mask imprinted with the circuit pattern on a resist-coated wafer, like a stamp. The technique was once considered a potential successor to optical immersion lithography, but the semiconductor industry threw its weight behind EUV. Canon was never a serious contender in that race. In fact, the Japanese firm dropped ArF lithography altogether, focusing instead on i-line and 248nm lithography.

Through the 2014 acquisition of US startup Molecular Imprints, however, Canon kept the hope alive to find its way back to the leading edge. At the launch of the NIL tool earlier this year, and again in the press release to announce the deal with TIE, the Japanese are positioning NIL as being capable of manufacturing the most advanced logic semiconductors. A Canon spokesperson told Nikkei that his company aims to sell around 10 to 20 units annually within three to five years.

Molecular Imprints was founded based on technology developed at the University of Texas at Austin, from which TIE sprouted. One of the company’s founders, S.V. Sreenivasan, is also a founder of TIE. The consortium, which is supported by semiconductor companies including Intel, NXP and Applied Materials, recently received an 840-million-dollar grant from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (Darpa) to establish a semiconductor R&D and prototyping fabrication facility.