SEMICONDUCTOR PROCESSING

The production of nextgeneration 256Mbit DRAM (dynamic randomaccess memory) chips with optical lithography will require writing feature sizes of less than 0.5 µm. Researchers at Rice University (Houston, TX) and Texas Instruments (Stafford, TX) developed an interferometric phaseshifting method that uses a singlelayer chromium mask to record patterns in UV photoresist. This method offers significant resolution and contrast enhancement over conventional trans mission photolithography processes

Nov 1st, 1994

Interferometric method promises subhalfmicron optical lithography

Optoelectronics gains competitive ground

More in Optics

The 200 mm wafers are contrasted in size with the new 300 mm wafers produced using nanoimprint lithography (NIL) to support glass technologies for augmented reality/mixed reality (AR/MR).

EVG & SCHOTT partner on 300 mm NIL wafers for AR/MR components

The work will take place at EVG’s NILPhotonics Competence Center, an open innovation incubator for nanoimprint lithography (NIL).

It has the size of a locomotive and will be a workhorse in fabs worldwide: The EUV stepper TWINSCAN NXE:3400B.

EUV lithography revisited

After three decades of development, a new generation of lithography machines has now been shipped; it uses extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light at a wavelength of 13.5 nm to make silicon features down to a few nanometers in size.

Application in Optical Design: Optimization for Receiver Enclosed Energy in LiDAR Systems

These sensors from the SmartSens/MEMS Drive partnership will feature added stabilization control to the rotation of the sensor, achieving optimal stabilization with no less than 5 axes.

SmartSens partners with MEMS Drive on CMOS chip-based image stabilization

The companies will collaborate on research in the field of CMOS chip-level optical image stabilization (OIS) technologies for new application areas.

James C. Wyant with Maria Ruiz in 2014, a first-year graduate student at the College of Optical Sciences, who that year received a Louise Wyant Memorial Scholarship in Optical Sciences. James Wyant and his family are now contributing $2 million and SPIE $500,000 to an educational-funding initiative for optics and photonics.

With $500,000 grant to University of Arizona, SPIE launches $2.5 million endowment matching program

Gooch & Housego (G&H) is partnering with Optex Systems to provide acrylic sighting instruments to the European market. Shown here are some Optex sighting systems.

Gooch & Housego partners with Optex to supply acrylic optics

The partnership combines Optex acrylic periscope products with G&H’s next-generation glass periscope hardware portfolio.

Thomas Crawford parlayed his research experience with disk drive technology into a startup company that eventually caught the eye of Thorlabs

University of South Carolina startup breaks ground in nano-optical manufacturing

Acquisition by Thorlabs facilitates continued university-industry partnership in Columbia, SC.

This ultrafast laser is used for industrial transparent and brittle material cutting.

GTS and Vitritech create new types of laser glass

The two new materials add to the range of glasses already produced by GTS and Vitritech for use in photonics.

Tracks of heavy ions 'imprinted' in lithium fluoride crystals. At the top, spot tracks observed under a fluorescence microscope in plates perpendicular to the heavy ion beam. At the bottom, the ion tracks in the parallel oriented plate (the blurring at both ends of the trace is an artifact of the depth of focus of the microscope). False colors.

Lithium fluoride fluorescent crystals track high-energy heavy ions such as iron

In comparison to previous crystals such as aluminum oxide, LiF crystals also require a less expensive microscope for analysis.

$Operation principles of a differential diffractive optical neural network. Since diffractive optical neural networks operate using coherent illumination, phase and/or amplitude channels of the input plane can be used to represent information.$

With new differential detection scheme, all-optical diffractive neural networks get performance boost

New design strategies achieve unprecedented levels of inference accuracy for all-optical, neural-network-based machine learning.

Lasers for lidar and more

Editor in chief John Lewis introduces Laser Focus World’s August 2019 issue, which includes trends in photonics technologies, applications, and markets.

Large-field cryogenic objective mirror has nearly diffraction-limited performance

Designed for use while being cooled by liquid helium, a cryogenic objective mirror with an aspherical surface has a NA of 0.93 and a field radius of 36 µm, large enough to image mammalian cells.

Metasurface optic for Gaussian beams accepts a nonplanar input beam

Most metasurface optics only accept plane-wave beams; a new hybrid metal-dielectric metastructure focuses a diverging Gaussian beam back on itself.

Several rotationally symmetric cavities are etched into a silicon wafer for glassblowing of 0.9-mm-diameter (left) and 1.8 mm (right) axicons.

Optical Fabrication: Glassblowing technique creates arrays of axicon lenses

Axicon lenses, which are useful for microfabrication, OCT, and other applications, can now be easily made in large quantities by glassblowing.