by Sarah Fister Gale, contributing editor, Solid State Technology
July 15, 2008 – Entegris is introducing two new filters to its Impact and Torrento product lines this week at SEMICON West to help fight the battle against smaller or more difficult to control contaminants in the fab.
“Every time you move to a smaller node you have to revisit contamination control requirements,” says Walter Plante, Entegris’ director of product management and marketing, liquid filtration products, contamination control solutions. “We are matching our technology with the [ITRS] Roadmap for defect reductions.”
Among the new crop of products is the Impact filter which enables retention of hard particles and gels for advanced processing nodes. Its asymmetric ultra-high polyethelene (UPE) membrane design places larger pores upstream in the filter with progressively tighter pores downstream, which lowers the device resistance (pressure drop) to maintain high-flow rates for point-of-use and bulk filtration of photochemicals. According to Plante, it is the first 5nm rated filter for point-of-use chemical filtration, “the tightest filtration technology available.” That means for a technology node migration a user can drop from a 20nm to a 5nm filter without losing flow rate. A Japanese IC manufacturer has already seen reductions of microbridge defects using the 5nm filters, the company claims.
For advanced wet etch and clean manufacturing processes (notably aggressive SPM, SC1, and SC2 chemistries), Entegris has added a 15nm PTFE membrane to its Torrento line. The Torrento filter features low pressure drop and a proprietary non-dewetting surface modification to ensure stability and extended performance.
Entegris also is introducing a new Scanner pre-filter system to extend the organic life of integral scanner filters, by better protecting against lens contamination from airborne low-molecular-weight silicon-containing (LMWS) and condensable organic species. This reduces lens-cleaning downtime and replacement delays, saving as much as millions of dollars, the company claims. “It’s a straightforward retrofit that is compliant with all manufacturers’ specs,” and requires no hardware changes, according to Jitze Stienstra, Entegris’ director of product marketing, gas filtration products, contamination control solutions.
Lastly, Entegris is rolling out a SiLVERSET chemical air filtration system for its E2600 filter cabinet, specifically to control trimethylsilanol (TMS) and related LMWS organics. “Over the years we’ve removed many contaminants from the fab, but the focus now is on increasingly difficult to remove contaminants” such as TMS, Stienstra said. — S.F.G.