Nikon will release the Litho Booster 1000 alignment station in January 2027, an overlay-metrology tool the company says improves measurement accuracy by about 35 percent and throughput by roughly 10 percent over its previous model.
The tool targets wafer-to-wafer bonding, the process chipmakers use to stack multiple wafers into a single 3D device. According to Nikon, that bonding step can introduce significant wafer distortion, and any misalignment left uncorrected before the next lithography exposure shows up as overlay error on the finished chip. The Litho Booster 1000 measures deformation and misalignment across the entire wafer surface before exposure and feeds the correction values forward to the lithography system, rather than relying on measurements taken after the fact.
Nikon points to the spread of 3D device structures, already standard in CMOS image sensors and expanding into NAND flash memory and logic chips, with DRAM expected to follow, as the reason overlay demands have grown more exacting. The company has sold alignment-station equipment since 2018, and it designed the new model to work alongside lithography systems from other suppliers as well as its own steppers and scanners.
Three engineering changes account for the gains Nikon is citing. A redesigned wafer holder cuts the errors introduced during wafer chucking, which the company credits as the main source of the accuracy improvement. An upgraded light source is meant to widen the range of process conditions the system can measure reliably. A faster wafer-transfer mechanism, built to tolerate more wafer warp than the prior generation, accounts for the throughput gain.
Nikon first disclosed the Litho Booster 1000 in December 2025 through its US subsidiary, Nikon Precision, when it targeted a launch in the second half of 2026; the January 2027 date confirmed now pushes that timeline back several months. Development of the system was supported in part by research funded through Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).
