Markets

The growing demands by end users for state-of-the-art chips are putting a great deal of pressure on the lithographic process. Luminescent Technologies products are unmatched by any other computational lithography tool on the market. Thanks to ongoing collaboration with manufacturing fabrication facilities and foundry relationships, Luminescent continues to expand the Explorer's unique capabilities, giving the industry a powerful and affordable solution that enables the migration to future manufacturing nodes using 193-nm lithography hardware.

INTEGRATED DEVICE MANUFACTURERS (IDMs)

IDMs are companies that both design and manufacture integrated circuits. IDM customers use corporate manufacturing fabrication facilities (‘fabs”) to manufacture, assemble and test their semiconductor component products and platform-level solutions. They achieve efficiencies through vertical integration. More companies maintain this model because of strengths in design and manufacturing operations. Inverse Explorer helps IDMs develop the process window for volume manufacturing. Meanwhile, Inverse Synthesizer is used to develop the mask set for a given design

FOUNDRIES

Foundries are the out-sourced wafer fabricating experts. Pioneered by TSMC, foundries have developed the silicon expertise to enable design companies to focus on design and worry less about manufacturing. A foundry's competitive advantage is being able to turn leading designs into silicon. Using Luminescent's Inverse Explorer, a foundry's development team can expedite the process of bringing sub-32nm process capability to market. Once in production, the foundry would use the Inverse Synthesizer product to quickly create the sub-32nm mask sets needed for production.

FABLESS SEMICONDUCTOR COMPANIES

These entities do all their chip designs in-house but do not own a wafer fabrication facility. Luminescent's Inverse Explorer product enables fabless chip designers to quickly identify and fix design hotspots based on a set of advanced manufacturing requirements. Luminescent's Inverse Synthesizer product is also highly applicable to leading edge fabless chip companies that actually perform the mask synthesis in-house.

MASK SUPPLIERS

Photomask suppliers manufacture and deliver the masks needed for lithographic wafer processing. There are typically two kinds of mask suppliers – Captive mask shops and Merchant mask shops. Both captive and merchant mask shops have extensive engineering operations to actually convert customer designs into manufacturable mask patterns by using lithography simulation and mask synthesis capabilities. They also rely on other hardware and software capabilities to analyze the mask and detect any defects once the mask is actually manufactured.Both of Luminescent's products Inverse Explorer and Inverse Synthesizer, are highly applicable to photomask suppliers and can deliver significant value to them.