Gear up to meet today’s fast-paced semiconductor industry

Born out of the rising demand for everyday electronics, the SLX laser mask writer is designed to meet the trend of making everything smarter: consumer goods, cars, Internet of Things devices, medical devices, and also industrial manufacturing equipment, to mention a few. This drives the demand for photomasks of mature design nodes due to the larger variety of designs required combined with price-sensitive volume manufacturing.

The industry prefers to use laser-based mask writers due to lower exposure cost per mask thus 70 ~ 75% of all photomasks are produced using laser technology, declaring laser mask writers as the backbone of the semiconductor industry.

However, laser mask writers in operation today are getting old making production slow and costly and consequently, not efficient for the purpose.

Mycronic addresses this challenge with the SLX series – a new generation cost-effective laser mask writer – built on a modern architecture securing stable and reliable system operation.

The best choice for cost-efficient production with environment impact considered

Mycronic has a unique position as a supplier of the world's most advanced mask writer for the display industry. For display photomask, fast writing speed with assured quality on an overall photomask area is critical since the size of the photomask is 50-100 times larger compared to the photomask used in the semiconductor industry. Leveraging the same multibeam writing technology from Mycronic’s most advanced display mask writer, the SLX series can expose 6” photomask as fast as 20 minutes with assured quality. In addition, the SLX series significantly reduces energy consumption by saving up to 99 percent of the power used for laser through Solid State Laser. The SLX series is the best system fit for price-sensitive mature semiconductor node manufacturing.

New modern extendable architecture

To meet the electronics market trends, the semiconductor industry has been evolving over time and the photomask industry should accommodate these trends. However, the laser tools in the field are old and difficult to maintain. The SLX series is built on the most up-to-date HW and SW platforms allowing support flexibility in a rapidly changing world and the possibility to develop new functionalities to meet future customer demands. Thus, the SLX will develop over time, and in the future improved and faster models will be released based on the same platform.

Access to skilled service from day 1

The SLX series shares the Evo control platform also used for other Mycronic mask writers. This means that our skilled service organization with a local presence can support SLX series from day 1 after system installation, allowing maximum system uptime and optimizing system performance which is not possible using the legacy systems in the field.