Matsushita, Renesas enter testing on 45nm

TOKYO — Renesas Technology Corp., and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. have advanced their collaboration in 45nm process development into a full integration test stage.

The R&D team at Renesas' Itami labs has already installed the ArF immersion system with a numerical aperture (N.A.) of more than 1.0., declining to disclose the supplier, and employing it for the logic process.

"We believe that we one-up competitors in actually applying NA 1.0 immersion technology to 45nm system-on-chip LSIs," said a Renesas spokesman.

Matsushita and Mitsubishi Electric Corp. started joint process development back in 1998. The collaboration was taken over by Renesas after Mitsubishi and Hitachi merged semiconductor operations to form Renesas. Through the joint R&D work, 130 nm, 90nm and 65 nm processes have been developed.