MII's CEO, Norm Shumaker, claims that MII is progressing on alignment — a critical challenge if imprint lithography is to succeed on the big stage: leading-edge integrated circuits. And while it may be expensive to build the proximity masks, or templates, the cost of imprint systems is a small fraction of scanners that require expensive lenses and lasers.

Masaomi Kameyama, an engineering manager at Nikon Corp., remains unconvinced. Imprint lithography will never match the throughput of optical lithography, he said, because each imprint must be cured before the template can step to the next position.

Will MII improve its throughput? The rapid progress it has made the past few years (including a recent sale to printer giant Hewlett-Packard) spurs optimism about MII's ability to attack the low-volume but critical-dimension end of the chip market.

On the downside, ASML CEO Stuart MacIntosh, who was in Austin recently for an International Sematech conference, said that he is winding down ASML's joint venture with Micronic Laser Systems AB (Taby, Sweden). The companies have been working on a maskless lithography scanner that would use a micromirror array to reflect light onto a wafer. The goal was 60-nm lines and spaces with a throughput of five wafers per hour.

"Bluntly speaking," MacIntosh said, "there have been no takers."

Perhaps imprint lithography, with its low cost, can attack the low-volume ASIC market that the maskless lithography startups are targeting.

David Lammers covers SoC process equipment. Contact him at dlammers@cmp.com.