December 7, 2005 – At Semicon Japan, a new ultraviolet thermal processing platform from Novellus was introduced that blends industry-standard lamp-based UV light sources with the company’s multistation sequential processing architecture.

With transistor and interconnect fabrication applications that require 5-10 minutes of total annealing, the SOLA (sequentially optimized luminescent anneal) tool should deliver 20-40 wafers/hr proportional throughputs.

Based on the Vector platform, the 300mm tool features four stations through which each wafer passes in series (see figure). Multistation single-wafer processing in this manner averages nonuniformities within each station for improved within-wafer uniformity.

Each station allows for different temperatures, light frequencies, and lumen intensities to be set, so that multistep anneals can be performed even though the time at each station remains constant.