While complementary e-beam lithography (CEBL) provides a new twist on how EBL can be worked into high-volume manufacturing, there are a couple other companies actively pursuing EBL technology.
KLA-Tencor has a technology they refer to as REBL: reflective electron beam lithography. Funded as a DARPA project, it amasses a whopping 106 beams. Interestingly, the payoff is throughput that’s 100x faster than what a single-beam can do, giving a decidedly sub-linear throughput boost. They’re seeing up to 10 wafers/hour for via and contact layers, and 2 wafers/hour for metal.
Meanwhile, a small company in Delft, Mapper, is working on a 13,000-beam machine that can do 10 wafers/hour per unit, clusterable in tens for 100 wafers/hour.
More information at the Mapper site. There appears to be no info on REBL on KLA-Tencor’s actual site, but you can find various bits by searching “REBL KLA.”
