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International SEMATECH (ISMT) established a program in 1996 to narrow the Next Generation Lithography (NGL) options on the SIA Roadmap through a global consensus process. Methodologies developed by the SIA Lithography Technical Working Group (TWG) were adopted to ensure a balanced and objective assessment. Critical reviews with emphasis on technical program plans, solutions to critical issues (showstoppers), error budget analysis, cost-of-ownership, business plans, and schedules were implemented with the Technical Champions of each technology. White papers were written by the Technical Champion teams to better educate the participants in the annual worldwide NGL workshops. Participants made their recommendations through a survey conducted at the end of each workshop. A Task Force of the key stakeholders from global chip makers, equipment suppliers and consortia was commissioned to review the workshop output, assess the progress on the critical issues and make recommendations to ISMT on narrowing the options. As a result of this global consensus process and the critical issue projects, the NGL Task Force has made the following recommendations: (i) November 1997 - Massively Parallel Direct Write (MPDW) is not mature enough for introduction until at least the 50nm node. (ii) December 1998 - ISMT should narrow its support to two options EUVL and EPL, and that other worldwide activity on X-Ray and IPL continue. (iii) December 1999 - ISMT should continue its support for EUVL and EPL for the 70nm node, it also recognized the growing possibility that the industry might need more than one mainstream technology for the diverging application of DRAM/MPU and ASIC/SOC. (iv) September 2000 - The industry in general should narrow its support for commercialization to EUVL and EPL for insertion at the 70nm node. (v) August 2001 - The industry should continue to fund the commercialization of both EUVL and EPL. Today, the ISMT program for NGL is transitioning from option selection to promoting critical issues solutions and commercial infrastructure for EUVL with initial focus on mask blanks. ISMT is also pursuing collaboration with the suppliers and consortia developing EPL technology to provide stable stencil mask for contact layers. This paper describes the evolution of the program, results of the year 2001 activities, and the plans for 2002.
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