Company
Mission
MonTec's mission is to provide the world's most advanced software tools to evaluate the impact of Coulomb
interactions on the performance of charged particle optics systems, such as:
-
Electron- and ion-beam lithography systems,
- Low-voltage scanning electron microscopes, and
- High brightness electron- or ion-sources.
MonTec's core products are the Monte Carlo Simulation program MC and the interactive modelling environment INTERAC.
Over two decades of R&D on Coulomb interactions
The software provided by MonTec results from a number of research programs carried at out by Guus Jansen over the past two decades for
Delft University of Technology and IBM's General Technology Division in the USA. The driving force behind this research
was the need to develop high-throughput particle beam lithography systems for the manufacturing of high density integrated circuits.
The throughput of such systems is directly related to the average current in the image exposed at one time.
It has long been appreciated that Coulomb interaction effects represent a fundamental limit to the maximum attainable beam current
at given resolution requirements, thereby imposing an upper limit to the throughput. The different phenomena of Coulomb interactions
- Boersch effect, trajectory displacement effect and space charge defocusing and blurring, have been subject to a great deal
of theoretical and experimental study over the past 40 years and also the subject of a certain amount of controversy.
Guus Jansen is the author of the Academic Press standard textbook Coulomb Interactions in Particle Beams and his work is well known in the public
literature.
The MonTec software is nowadays used by
leading companies
around the world for the design and optimisation of electron- and ion-beam lithography systems and scanning electron microscopes.
MonTec Particle Optics Simulation Package
The particle optics simulation software provided by MonTec was first commercially released in 1990. It has been recently (2003) upgraded into a Windows
complient integrated modelling environment with the capability to apply and compare the following alternative theoretical
approaches to estimate the impact of Coulomb interactions in combination with lens aberrations:
- Monte Carlo simulation, a brute force numerical method in which a bunch of particles with randomly chosen initial
coordinates, reflecting the properties of the beam in the vicinity of the source, is traced through a user defined system,
- Analytical equations from the Extended Two-Particle (ETP) model as published in the Academic Press textbook.
Coulomb Interactions in Particle Beams and the Journal of Applied Physics, and
- Slice method based on a numerical integration of the analytical equations from the ETP-model for a
thin cylindrical slice of the beam.
The MS Excel based INTERAC program provides the means to execute the three different approaches from the same system description and
to compare the results. It also provides a Windows based shell around the FORTRAN based Monte Carlo simulation program MC. INTERAC has been designed to create a modelling environment that is both powerful and easy to use.
INTERAC provides the means to model particle beam systems quickly without the need for a detailed understanding of the underlying theory.
Partners and customers
The company works together with Particle Optics Group at Delft University and has delivered its software and design services
to companies as IBM, NTT, Philips, Siemens as well as various universities in Europe, the US and Japan.
MonTec is a subsidiary of the
Caneval Consultants Network.
This company also handles all correspondence
and administration on behalf of MonTec.
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