Korean Road Map for micropatterning into the next century

As the semiconductor industry enters the next century, we are facing to the technological changes and challenges. Optical lithography has driven by the miniaturisation of semiconductor devices and has been accompanied by an increase in wafer productivity and performance through the reduction of the IC image geometries. In the last three decades, DRAMs(Dynamic Random Access Memories) have been quadrupling in level of integration every three year. The 16 Mb DRAM (0.5 μm design rules) is into volume manufacturing. Early 64 Mb DRAM (0.35 μm design rules) manufacturing is now on target. Logic circuits follows a similar trend, although 2 or 3 years later. Korean chip makers have been produced the memory devices, mainly DRAM, which are the driving force of IC's (Integrated Circuits) development and are the technology indicator for advanced manufacturing. Therefore, Korean chip makers have an important position to predict and lead the patterning technology. In this paper, we will be discussed the limitations of the optical lithography and post optical lithography technology, such as E-beam lithography and X-ray lithography for the next century.