Our Policies on Human Capital Management
Please refer to the Sustainability page.
Our Policies on Investment in Intellectual Property
Our group collaborates with material manufacturers to develop advanced mask blanks. This enables us to gain deep insights regarding material composition, allowing us to optimize our own process of the advanced photomask production. Since photomask blank characteristics also influence wafer production processes, we are entitled to catch the demands for advanced photomask at a very early stage through the co-development of blank optimization & the proposal to our customers. For instance, the development of material "Opaque MoSi on Glass" ("OMOG"), which realizes high accuracy for binary mask is one of the successful cases. As a result, it becomes a common material in the industry and is supplied by the blank manufacturer, our co-developer. Currently, We are developing photomask blanks for the next generation of High Numerical Aperture ("High-NA") EUV, and we expect ourselves to set the industry standards in EUV by the technology we have developed.
In addition to the competitive advantage with respect to intellectual property rights, the involvement of material development not only build the entry barriers for competitors at the initial stage but also make contribution to our revenue through royalty fee at the popularization stage.
Our group engages in joint development projects with various partners in cutting-edge technology. We collaborate not only with photomask material manufacturers and equipment manufacturers but also with the research and development institutions across the wafer supply chain such as the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (imec) and other R&D institutions. Most recently, we signed a joint development agreement with International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) for EUV photomask processes targeting 2nm semiconductors.