Category Archives: Metrology

December 7, 2011 — Process control supplier KLA-Tencor Corporation (NASDAQ: KLAC) added to its SensArray portfolio of advanced wireless temperature monitoring wafers. The products use time-based, in-situ temperature monitoring to register process-environment effects on production semiconductor wafers.

The additions were developed with the aid of leading IC makers and OEMs. The EtchTemp-SE (ET-SE), ScannerTemp and WetTemp-LP products help monitor temperature information across the entire wafer surface under real process conditions. SensArray thermal information can be used to optimize manufacturing equipment performance and uptime, qualify tools, perform root cause analysis of process excursions, and track manufacturing trends.
 
ET-SE delivers temperature wafer monitoring during silicon etch processes, providing temperature measurements with a higher signal-to-noise ratio than alternative methods. ET-SE assists in matching front-end-of-line etch chambers and qualifying electrostatic chucks.

ScannerTemp allows highly accurate temperature monitoring of dry and immersion lithography systems that have temperature-sensitive overlay performance. With a flat, standard-thickness wafer format, it offers a sensor-to-sensor range of 0.03

December 5, 2011 — Applied Materials Inc. debuted its defect review scanning electron microscope (DR-SEM) Applied SEMVision G5 system to image and analyze 20nm yield-limiting defects in a semiconductor production environment without manual intervention. Identifying and imaging relevant defects with 1nm pixel size, the SEMVision G5 system allows logic and memory makers to pinpoint the root cause of defects faster and more accurately, Applied reports.

The SEMVision G5 system is capable of identifying, analyzing and finding defects in challenging patterning layers with increased throughput. AMAT reports that it is highly accurate in separating real from false alarm "nuisance defects," beating a human operator in comparisons.

The SEMVision G5 system is an open architecture platform that dynamically combines data received from a wafer inspection system with a library of predefined review strategies. The system automatically creates new review recipes, targeting foundry users with thousands of new chip designs to manufacture each year.

"We’ve already shipped multiple SEMVision G5 systems to customers, including repeat orders," said Itai Rosenfeld, corporate vice president and general manager of Applied’s Process Diagnostics and Control business unit.

Applied Materials will exhibit at SEMICON Japan, December 7-9 in Chiba, Japan at Booth 3D-1001.

More SEMICON Japan products:

Applied Materials, Inc. (Nasdaq:AMAT) provides equipment, services and software to enable the manufacture of advanced semiconductor, flat panel display and solar photovoltaic products. Learn more at www.appliedmaterials.com.

November 30, 2011 — GLOBALFOUNDRIES appointed a new chief financial officer (CFO) from its shareholder Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC). Daniel Durn previously served as executive director of the investment and strategy unit at ATIC, and has been an investment banker and in the Merger Leadership Group at Goldman Sachs.

In addition to helping create GLOBALFOUNDRIES through the acquisition of AMD

November 18, 2011 — Citing a change in the microscope customer market over the past decade, Carl Zeiss launchEd Carl Zeiss Microscopy. 2,500 employees of MicroImaging und Nano Technology Systems now form the new business group in the Carl Zeiss Group.

Fusing Carl Zeiss MicroImaging and Nano Technology Systems into one business group reflects the customer base in research and industry, who are increasingly using both light and electron systems. Combining the groups will better integrate software and workflow across these products.

Ten years ago, says Dr. Frank Stietz, Head of the Materials Division at Carl Zeiss Microscopy, the majority of electron microscope users were in the semiconductor industry. The Nano Technology Systems division moving from the Semiconductor Manufacturing technology business group into Carl Zeiss Microscopy to reflect the diversification of customers.

Combined light and electron microscopy work is enabling new research areas, like 3D brain maps being made at Harvard University by Professor Jeff Lichtman, the company notes. In industry, integrated systems enable enormous advances in productivity for particle analysis, for example.

Carl Zeiss Microscopy now operates globally with a uniform market identity and a shared sales organization. The company is represented with sales and service operations in 33 countries, and with production and research sites in six. The reorganization of business groups opens new growth potential in life sciences and industry, as well as in rapidly developing economies on the other. The next step is the legal integration of the two companies in Germany due for finalization by the summer of 2012. In the USA, France, UK and Japan, the legal integration has already been completed.

Learn more at www.zeiss.de.

November 18, 2011 — North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $939.4 million in orders in October 2011, and billed $1.27 billion, bringing the book-to-bill ratio up a few ticks to 0.74, according to SEMI.

The three-month average of worldwide bookings in October 2011 was $939.4 million: 1.4% more than September 2011 and 41.1% below the $1.59 billion seen in October 2010.

The three-month average of worldwide billings in October 2011 was $1.27 billion: 3.6% below September 2011 and 22.0% less than the October 2010 billings level of $1.62 billion.

November 18, 2011 – GLOBE NEWSWIRE — Intermolecular Inc. (Nasdaq:IMI) priced its initial public offering of 9,650,000 shares of common stock at a public offering price of $10.00 per share. Intermolecular common stock will begin trading on The NASDAQ Global Select Market today under the symbol "IMI."

Of the 9,650,000 shares of common stock being offered to the public, 5,681,796 shares are being offered by Intermolecular, and the selling stockholder identified in the prospectus is offering an additional 3,968,204 shares. Intermolecular will not receive any proceeds from the sale of the shares by the selling stockholder.

In addition, the Company has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 1,447,500 shares of common stock to cover over-allotments, if any. Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and Barclays Capital Inc. are acting joint book-running managers for the offering. Pacific Crest Securities LLC and Needham & Company, LLC are serving as co-managers.

Intermolecular accelerates research and development, innovation, and time-to-market for the semiconductor and clean-energy industries, using the company’s high productivity combinatorial (HPC) platform and multi-disciplinary team. The company was founded in 2004 in San Jose, CA. Learn more at www.intermolecular.com.

The initial public offering is being made only by means of a prospectus. Copies of the final prospectus, when available, may be obtained from Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, Prospectus Department, 180 Varick Street, 2nd Floor, New York, New York 10014, by phone at 1-866-718-1649, or by email at [email protected], from J.P.

Morgan Securities LLC, c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, New York 11717, or by phone at 1-866-803-9204, or from Barclays Capital Inc., c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, New York 11717, by phone at
1-888-603-5847 or by email at [email protected].

A registration statement (including the prospectus) relating to these shares of Intermolecular common stock filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was declared effective on November 17, 2011. Copies of the registration statement, as amended, can be accessed through the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov.

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November 16, 2011 — ICs developed at advanced technology nodes of 65nm and below exhibit an increased sensitivity to small manufacturing variations. New design-specific and feature-sensitive failure mechanisms are on the rise. Complex variability issues that involve interactions between process and layout features can mask systematic yield issues, as devices and structures get smaller and smaller. These factors make yield management a big challenge for wafer fabs. Data failure analysis (DFA), electrical failure analysis (EFA), and physical failure analysis (PFA) are three important methods for yield management. DFA is to analyze field failure data such as correctness and performance. EFA and PFA are to identify the physical location of the failure, find this physical failure in the chip, and then link it to a process step to fix in-line problems. However, traditional wafer-level EFA and PFA methods on advanced technology products are no longer sufficient. It is important to trace the implementation of the solution to ensure that no side effects from these actions have created new failures, and to make sure that the failure will not appear again.

Overview of yield management in fabrication

Yield management in the foundry involves many players. Technical development, process integration engineers, inline process engineers, and reliability engineers all have responsibility for meeting the expected yield. Technical development engineers in charge of process development and optimization give technical and design support for inline production wafer manufacturing. Process integration engineers monitor inline defect sources for defect reduction and control the quality of wafer acceptance test (WAT) results. Inline process engineers assure the machines are working smoothly and improve the process margin. Reliability engineers monitor inline production wafers reliability performance. But inline process always has variations, which will induce wafer low yield or reliability/quality issues. When the customer or test feedback finds a yield issue, the product engineer is in charge of yield analysis and will apply DFA, EFA and PFA. The traditional physical and electrical failure analysis is (EFA and PFA) shown in Fig. 1.

Figure 1. Traditional EFA and PFA methods.

When logic or memory products fail, DC test data analysis is the first step. From this we can determine whether bad dice have different DC currents and waveforms from good ones, which helps with fault localization. When the outliers are found, techniques to identify

November 17, 2011 – Marketwire — DCG Systems Inc. introduced the OPTIFIB Viper system for circuit edit at the 22nm node. It uses a new coaxial photon-ion column to provide spot sizes 50% smaller than those of the flagship OptiFIB-IV.

OptiFIB Viper operates at lower beam energies, avoiding damage to sensitive materials and enabling easier resolution of small-geometry device features; the practical resolution at 15kV and below enables edits of sensitive materials. The endpoint capability at sub-pA beam currents is exceptional, according to the company. The working distance remains "fundamentally unchanged" and "coaxial photon imaging is equally compelling," reports the first customer for the OPTIFIB Viper.

The system also boasts better sample exchange pump-down efficiency than prior tools, and an in-chamber stage and jet movement observation camera for user reference. The circuit edit system can duplicate frequently used apertures with the Increased number of apertures.

DCG Systems is working on fault isolation at the 11nm node as well, under a set of contracts worth $17 million from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).

DCG Systems Inc. provides semiconductor debug and characterization solutions for the semiconductor industry. For more information please visit www.dcgsystems.com.

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November 3, 2011 — Authors from Avantor Performance Materials and SSMC Inc. compare the use of a semi-aqueous post-etch ash residue remover with an industry-standard hydroxyl-amine (HA)-based residue removal chemistry. The semi-aqueous-based product was shown to reduce cost of ownership for manufacturing of low- and high-voltage logic devices. The use of this newer generation engineered product was also shown to increase yield when used to replace the existing residue removal chemistry in fabrication of 45nm logic devices.

SSMC decided to test BAKER ALEG-380 from Avantor Performance Materials, Inc. (formerly Mallinckrodt Baker, Inc.) to assess whether changing the process of record (POR) chemistry for post-etch metal and oxide residue removal could be accomplished without impacting yield, device quality, and with the desired cost savings.

The product being tested (BAKER ALEG-380) is an engineered blend of organic solvents and semi-aqueous components suitable for bulk photoresist removal and post-etch ash residue and sidewall polymer removal. Designed to provide broad latitude in terms of processing times and temperatures, it is 100% water soluble and contains no HA or fluoride elements.

Initial tests demonstrated improved yield

One of the significant process challenges associated with using HA-based post-etch residue removal products is the chemistry