At SEMICON West 2008, Cymer, Inc., the market’s leading developer of light sources used to create advanced semiconductor chips, announces its second-generation Gas Lifetime eXtension (GLX2™) control system for the XLA and XLR series light sources.  GLX2 further extends the maximum time between light source gas exchanges from one billion pulses to two billion pulses, and reduces downtime associated with gas refills by a factor of 20, compared with non-GLX systems. Chipmakers with GLX2 can achieve a positive return on investment in less than three months in high utilization fabs.

The company also announces the 100th installation of its first-generation GLX control system. The only production-proven solution to significantly reduce the frequency of gas exchanges, Cymer’s GLX has been quickly adopted by chipmakers worldwide since its introduction in late 2007.  With a GLX control system on the light source, a typical scanner system can experience increases in wafer passes per year of between 2500 and 15000.

“Cymer's rapid implementation of its GLX technology has been a significant contributor to the recent increased productivity of our lithography tools by increasing equipment uptime and providing more stable laser operation,” said Mr. Hi-Youn Cho, senior manager, memory division, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

GLX installations show improved bandwidth stability trends over the extended gas lifetimes, enabling chipmakers to better meet their critical dimension (CD) control requirements.  Chipmakers can expect the same stability with GLX2. 

 “In less than one year, we have released two generations of GLX and decreased the downtime associated with gas refills by a factor of 20,” said Ed Brown, president and chief operating officer of Cymer.  “GLX and GLX2 represent Cymer’s ongoing commitment to continuously improve customer light source productivity while reducing their cost of operation.”