Electron-Mec S.R.L.

Hoya's mask blanks enjoy the No. 1 market share worldwide. Customers include semiconductor manufacturers worldwide and producers of photomasks. Mask blanks consist of a glass substrate, which is used as the pattern master when fabricating semiconductor devices such as LSI chips, over which a thin metal coating has been applied. They are made to extremely precise specifications; surface roughness must be one millionth of a millimeter or less and surface flatness must be within one ten-millionth of a millimeter. They are fashioned from composite quartz glass having an effective expansion rate close to zero. The most popular product size is in the process of shifting from 5 inches (12.7 cm) to 6 inches (15.24 cm) while at the same time demand for high-precision products is growing, spurred by competition to develop the next generation of highly precise semiconductor devices.