IBM used Albany immersion tool to make Power processor

LONDON — IBM Corp. used a Twinscan AT:1150i lithography machine from ASML Holdings NV installed at the Albany Nanotech campus in New York state to make examples of a 64-bit Power processor, Silicon Strategies has learned.

A claim to have applied immersion lithography to make "commercial" chips was made by Bernie Meyerson, the chief technology officer of the IBM Systems & Technology Group, as part of the announcement of an open standards initiative in Beijing on Thursday (Dec. 2) centering on IBM's Power microprocessor architecture.

Although the chips made using immersion lithography are of a commercial design, it is not thought that they would be supplied to customers on a commercial basis.

"We built a litho-critical level of a 90-nm generation 64-bit Power processor which is now in production in our East Fishkill [N.Y.] 300-mm fab [using the technology]. The immersion parts were put into modules and passed the same module functionality tests that the normal production parts are given prior to shipment to the customer," a spokesperson told Silicon Strategies in an e-mail.

"The normal production route for this part number uses dry lithography — the purpose of this effort was to show that we have been able to overcome the issues associated with verifying that immersion is production-capable, like defects, overlay, resist material, water handling, wafer logistics, etc.," he continued.

"We were able to get comparable yield using the immersion process as we do in the normal all-dry lithography production in Fishkill," the spokesperson added.

The spokesperson confirmed that IBM had used the immersion lithography tool installed at Albany NanoTech in August 2004.

The College for Nanoscale Science and Engineering within the Albany-based R&D organization is processing 300-mm wafers, on a line based around ASML's Twinscan AT:1150i immersion scanner.

"This tool is a production 193-nm lithography tool which has been converted to be an initial immersion prototype; it was used in a production mode of operation. Only the immersion-level was done in Albany, the rest of the processing was done in Fishkill," the spokesperson said.

Taiwanese foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. remains the only commercial chip company to have received an immersion lithography machine, a Twinscan XT:1250i. Research group IMEC (Leuven, Belgium) is scheduled to receive ASML's third machine this month and it was announced Wednesday (Dec. 1) that the fourth immersion lithography machine would be installed at the Maydan Technology Center of Applied Materials Inc. early 2005.