Tag Archives: letter-wafer-tech

Today, KLA-Tencor Corporation (NASDAQ:  KLAC) introduced three advanced reticle inspection systems that address 10nm and below mask technologies: the Teron 640, Teron SL655 and Reticle Decision Center (RDC). All three systems are key to enabling both current and next-generation mask designs, so that mask shops and IC fabs can more efficiently identify lithographically significant and severe yield-damaging defects.

KLA-Tencor's new reticle inspection portfolio - Teron 640, Teron SL655 and RDC - provides high performance reticle quality control for mask shops and IC fabs

KLA-Tencor’s new reticle inspection portfolio – Teron 640, Teron SL655 and RDC – provides high performance reticle quality control for mask shops and IC fabs

Utilizing Dual Imaging technology, the Teron 640 inspection system offers the sensitivity necessary for mask shops to accurately qualify advanced optical masks. The Teron SL655 inspection system introduces new STARlightGold technology, helping IC manufacturers assess incoming reticle quality, monitor reticle degradation and detect yield-critical reticle defects. The comprehensive reticle quality measurements produced by the Teron inspectors are supported by RDC, a data analysis and management system that provides a wide array of capabilities that drive automated defect disposition decisions, improve cycle time and reduce the reticle-related patterning errors that can affect yield.

“Today’s complex patterning techniques, such as spacer assist quadruple patterning (SAQP), utilize increasingly complex masks, making it crucial to qualify and maintain the reticle state to achieve optimal wafer patterning,” stated Yalin Xiong, Ph.D., vice president and general manager of the Reticle Products Division (RAPID) at KLA-Tencor. “Our team has developed state-of-the-art reticle inspection and data analysis technologies that address both current and next-generation mask designs. By tying the rich datasets generated by the Teron 640 and Teron SL655 to RDC’s evaluation capabilities, mask shops and IC fabs can more efficiently identify lithographically significant reticle defects, thereby improving mask quality control and obtaining better production patterning.”

Built on the Teron reticle inspection platform for mask shops, the Teron 640 supports inspection of advanced optical masks through the utilization of 193nm illumination with Dual Imaging mode—a combination of high resolution inspection and aerial imaging with printability-based defect dispositioning. Additionally, the Teron 640 includes enhancements to advanced die-to-database inspection algorithms to further maximize defect sensitivity as well as a new higher throughput option to decrease time to results. Multiple Teron 640 reticle inspection systems have been installed at foundry and logic manufacturers where they are being used for high-performance reticle quality control.

The Teron SL655’s core technology, STARlightGold, generates a golden reference from the mask at incoming quality check and then uses this reference for mask re-qualification inspections. The unique technology enables full-field reticle coverage and maximizes the detection of defects, such as haze growth or contamination, on a full range of mask types, including those that utilize highly complicated optical proximity techniques. The Teron SL655’s production throughput supports the fast cycle times required to qualify the increased number of reticles associated with advanced multi-patterning techniques. In addition, the Teron SL655 is EUV-compatible, allowing collaboration with IC manufacturers on in-fab EUV reticle inspection requirements. Teron SL655 systems are under evaluation with IC manufacturers for incoming reticle quality control and reticle re-qualification during chip production.

RDC is a comprehensive data analysis and storage platform that supports multiple KLA-Tencor reticle inspection and metrology platforms for mask shops and IC fabs. RDC provides several applications including Automatic Defect Classification (ADC), which runs concurrently with the inspection station, and Lithography Plane Review (LPR), which analyzes the printability of defects detected by reticle inspectors. These applications automate defect disposition decisions, resulting in improved cycle time and reduction in critical errors. RDC has been adopted by multiple foundry and memory manufacturers for data management and analysis during mask qualification.

The Teron 640, Teron SL655 and RDC join the LMS IPRO6 reticle pattern placement metrology system and K-T Analyzer advanced data analysis system in providing a comprehensive reticle qualification solution for advanced mask and IC manufacturers. The Teron 640, Teron SL655 and RDC are also critical components in KLA-Tencor’s 5D Patterning Control Solution™, which helps IC manufacturers obtain better patterning performance through process monitoring and control throughout the fab and mask shop. To maintain the high performance and productivity demanded by leading-edge mask and IC manufacturing, the Teron 640, Teron SL655 and RDC are backed by KLA-Tencor’s global comprehensive service network. More information can be found on the 5D Patterning Control Solution web page.

One of the most critical issues the United States faces today is preventing terrorists from smuggling nuclear weapons into its ports. To this end, the U.S. Security and Accountability for Every Port Act mandates that all overseas cargo containers be scanned for possible nuclear materials or weapons.

Detecting neutron signals is an effective method to identify nuclear weapons and special nuclear materials. Helium-3 gas is used within detectors deployed in ports for this purpose.

The catch? While helium-3 gas works well for neutron detection, it’s extremely rare on Earth. Intense demand for helium-3 gas detectors has nearly depleted the supply, most of which was generated during the period of nuclear weapons production during the past 50 years. It isn’t easy to reproduce, and the scarcity of helium-3 gas has caused its cost to skyrocket recently — making it impossible to deploy enough neutron detectors to fulfill the requirement to scan all incoming overseas cargo containers.

Helium-4 is a more abundant form of helium gas, which is much less expensive, but can’t be used for neutron detection because it doesn’t interact with neutrons.

A group of Texas Tech University researchers led by Professors Hongxing Jiang and Jingyu Lin report this week in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, that they have developed an alternative material — hexagonal boron nitride semiconductors — for neutron detection. This material fulfills many key requirements for helium gas detector replacements and can serve as a low-cost alternative in the future.

The group’s concept was first proposed to the Department of Homeland Security’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office and received funding from its Academic Research Initiative program six years ago.

By using a 43-micron-thick hexagonal boron-10 enriched nitride layer, the group created a thermal neutron detector with 51.4 percent detection efficiency, which is a record high for semiconductor thermal neutron detectors.

“Higher detection efficiency is anticipated by further increasing the material thickness and improving materials quality,” explained Professor Jiang, Nanophotonics Center and Electrical & Computer Engineering, Whitacre College of Engineering, Texas Tech University.

“Our approach of using hexagonal boron nitride semiconductors for neutron detection centers on the fact that its boron-10 isotope has a very large interaction probability with thermal neutrons,” Jiang continued. “This makes it possible to create high-efficiency neutron detectors with relatively thin hexagonal boron nitride layers. And the very large energy bandgap of this semiconductor — 6.5 eV — gives these detectors inherently low leakage current densities.”

The key significance of the group’s work? This is a completely new material and technology that offers many advantages.

“Compared to helium gas detectors, boron nitride technology improves the performance of neutron detectors in terms of efficiency, sensitivity, ruggedness, versatile form factor, compactness, lightweight, no pressurization … and it’s inexpensive,” Jiang said.

This means that the material has the potential to revolutionize neutron detector technologies.

“Beyond special nuclear materials and weapons detection, solid-state neutron detectors also have medical, health, military, environment, and industrial applications,” he added. “The material also has applications in deep ultraviolet photonics and two-dimensional heterostructures. With the successful demonstration of high-efficiency neutron detectors, we expect it to perform well for other future applications.”

The main innovation behind this new type of neutron detector was developing hexagonal boron nitride with epitaxial layers of sufficient thickness — which previously didn’t exist.

“It took our group six years to find ways to produce this new material with a sufficient thickness and crystalline quality for neutron detection,” Jiang noted.

Based on their experience working with III-nitride wide bandgap semiconductors, the group knew at the outset that producing a material with high crystalline quality would be difficult.

“It’s surprising to us that the detector performs so well, despite the fact that there’s still a little room for improvement in terms of material quality,” he said.

One of the most important impacts of the group’s work is that “this new material and its potential should begin to be recognized by the semiconductor materials and radiation detection communities,” Jiang added.

Now that the group has solved the problem of producing hexagonal boron nitride with sufficient thickness, as well as crystalline quality to enable the demonstration of neutron detectors with high efficiency, the next step is to demonstrate high-sensitivity of large-size detectors.

“These devices must be capable of detecting nuclear weapons from distances tens of meters away, which requires large-size detectors,” Jiang added. “There are technical challenges to overcome, but we’re working toward this goal.”

POET Technologies Inc. (OTCQX:POETF) (TSX Venture:PTK), a developer of opto-electronics fabrication processes for the semiconductor industry, today announced that it has taken one more significant step toward its goal of developing a fully integrated commercial opto-electronic technology platform.

The milestone achieved is the first demonstration of functional Hetero-junction Field Effect Transistors (HFETs) down to 250nm effective gate lengths on the same proprietary epitaxy and utilizing the same integrated process sequence that was previously used to demonstrate high performance detectors. This milestone is the latest in POET’s initiative to integrate a detector, HFET and laser together into a single chip, the three key components of an active optical cable, a current market target for POET.

“Two of the three critical individual pieces of an integrated opto-electronic product are now in place and undergoing their respective optimization cycles,” said Dr. Subhash Deshmukh, POET’s Chief Operating Officer.  “As reported earlier, we have encountered delays in completing the VCSEL milestone.  The VCSEL continues to be our focus, even while we simultaneously make progress on other aspects of the technology.  The characterization that has been done to date on the VCSEL points to required optimization of a few layers in a very complex and unique epitaxial stack and fine tuning of the resonant cavity mode. The new and optimized epitaxial structure is expected to be delivered to the foundry for processing over the next couple of months,” said Dr. Deshmukh.  “We have not uncovered any fundamental show-stoppers.  We are charting new territory here and as pointed out at the recent town hall meeting and at the annual meeting of shareholders, technical issues are commonly encountered throughout the R&D process and we are systematically understanding and addressing these issues.”

POET has already demonstrated electrical functionality of the VCSEL with desired thyristor characteristics and demonstrated lasing modes through optical pumping of the VCSEL cavity (in other words light emission was detected on the epitaxial wafer surface).  However in order to enable electrical pumping of the VCSEL, the team has had to redesign some aspects of the epitaxial stack. VCSEL functionality was previously verified in a lab setting and the functionality of that original laser has been retested and reconfirmed.

“POET management is delighted to report this new achievement and reaffirms their confidence in the roadmap and progress in the lab to fab to commercialization of monolithic opto-electronic products. We will provide the next update around the earnings call, which we intend to schedule for early Q4 2016,” said Dr. Suresh Venkatesan.

Lam Research Corp. (NASDAQ: LRCX), an advanced manufacturer of semiconductor equipment, today introduced an atomic layer deposition (ALD) process for depositing low-fluorine-content tungsten films, the latest addition to its ALTUS family of products. With the industry’s first low-fluorine tungsten (LFW) ALD process, the ALTUS Max E Series addresses memory chipmakers’ key challenges and enables the continued scaling of 3D NAND and DRAM devices. Building on Lam’s market-leading product portfolio for memory applications, the new system is gaining market traction worldwide, winning production positions at leading 3D NAND and DRAM manufacturers and placement at multiple R&D sites.

“Consumer demand for ever more powerful devices is driving the need for high-capacity, high-performance storage, and deposition and etch are key process technology enablers of advanced memory chips,” said Tim Archer, Lam’s chief operating officer. “With the addition of the ALTUS Max E Series, we are expanding our memory portfolio and enabling our customers to capitalize on this next wave of industry drivers. Over the past twelve months, as the 3D NAND inflection has accelerated, we have doubled our shipments for these applications, leading to the largest deposition and etch installed base in our 3D NAND served markets.”

As manufacturers increase the number of memory cell layers for 3D NAND, two issues have become apparent for tungsten deposition in the word line fill application. First, fluorine diffusion from the tungsten film into the dielectrics can cause physical defects. Second, higher cumulative stress in devices with more than 48 pairs has resulted in excessive bowing. The resulting defects and stress can cause yield loss, as well as degraded electrical performance and device reliability. Because of these issues, tungsten films for advanced 3D NAND devices must have significantly reduced fluorine and intrinsic stress. Further, as critical dimensions shrink, resistance scaling becomes more challenging for the DRAM buried word line, as well as for metal gate/metal contact applications in logic devices.

“As memory chip manufacturers move to smaller nodes, the features that need to be filled are increasingly narrow and have higher aspect ratios,” said Sesha Varadarajan, group vice president, Deposition Product Group. “Lam’s new LFW ALD solution uses a controlled surface reaction to tune stress and fluorine levels and to lower resistance, all while delivering the required tungsten fill performance and productivity. When compared to chemical vapor deposition tungsten, the ALTUS Max E Series lowers fluorine content by up to 100x, lowers stress by up to 10x, and reduces resistivity by over 30%, solving some of our customers’ most critical scaling and integration challenges.”

The ALTUS Max E Series with LFW ALD technology offers a unique all-ALD deposition process that leverages Lam’s PNL (Pulsed Nucleation Layer) technology, which is the industry benchmark for tungsten ALD with 15 years of market leadership and more than 1,000 modules in production. Lam led the transition of chemical vapor deposition (CVD) tungsten nucleation to ALD tungsten nucleation with its PNL technology. The company continued that leadership by advancing low-resistivity tungsten solutions with its products ALTUS Max with PNLxT™, ALTUS Max with LRWxT, and ALTUS Max ExtremeFill for enhanced fill performance.

The ALTUS products use Lam’s quad-station module (QSM) architecture to allow per-station optimization of tungsten nucleation and fill for fluorine, stress, and resistance without compromising fill performance since station temperature can be set independently. The QSM configuration also maximizes productivity of the all-ALD process by providing up to 12 pedestals per system, enabling the highest footprint productivity in the industry.

Designers of solar cells may soon be setting their sights higher, as a discovery by a team of researchers has revealed a class of materials that could be better at converting sunlight into energy than those currently being used in solar arrays. Their research shows how a material can be used to extract power from a small portion of the sunlight spectrum with a conversion efficiency that is above its theoretical maximum — a value called the Shockley-Queisser limit. This finding, which could lead to more power-efficient solar cells, was seeded in a near-half-century old discovery by Russian physicist Vladimir M. Fridkin, a visiting professor of physics at Drexel, who is also known as one of the innovators behind the photocopier.

The team, which includes scientists from Drexel University, the Shubnikov Institute of Crystallography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the University of Pennsylvania and the U. S. Naval Research Laboratory recently published its findings in the journal Nature Photonics. Their article “Power conversion efficiency exceeding the Shockley-Queisser limit in a ferroelectric insulator,” explains how they were able to use a barium titanate crystal to convert sunlight into electric power much more efficiently than the Shockley-Queisser limit would dictate for a material that absorbs almost no light in the visible spectrum — only ultraviolet.

A phenomenon that is the foundation for the new findings was observed by Fridkin, who is one of the principal co-authors of the paper, some 47 years ago, when he discovered a physical mechanism for converting light into electrical power — one that differs from the method currently employed in solar cells. The mechanism relies on collecting “hot” electrons, those that carry additional energy in a photovoltaic material when excited by sunlight, before they lose their energy. And though it has received relatively little attention until recently, the so-called “bulk photovoltaic effect,” might now be the key to revolutionizing our use of solar energy.

The limits of solar energy

Solar energy conversion has been limited thus far due to solar cell design and electrochemical characteristics inherent to the materials used to make them.

“In a conventional solar cell — made with a semiconductor — absorption of sunlight occurs at an interface between two regions, one containing an excess of negative-charge carriers, called electrons, and the other containing an excess of positive-charge carriers, called holes,” said Alessia Polemi, a research professor in Drexel’s College of Engineering and one of the co-authors of the paper.

In order to generate electron-hole pairs at the interface, which is necessary to have an electric current, the sunlight’s photons must excite the electrons to a level of energy that enables them to vacate the valence band and move into the conduction band — the difference in energy levels between these two bands is referred to as the “band gap.” This means that in photovoltaic materials, not all of the available solar spectrum can be converted into electrical power. And for sunlight photon energies that are higher than the band gap, the excited electrons will lose it excess energy as heat, rather than converting it to electric current. This process further reduces the amount of power can be extracted from a solar cell.

“The light-induced carriers generate a voltage, and their flow constitutes a current. Practical solar cells produce power, which is the product of current and voltage,” Polemi said. “This voltage, and therefore the power that can be obtained, is also limited by the band gap.”

But, as Fridkin discovered in 1969 — and the team validates with this research — this limitation is not universal, which means solar cells can be improved.

New life for an old theory

When Fridkin and his colleagues at the Institute of Crystallography in Moscow observed an unusually high photovoltage while studying the ferroelectric antimony sulfide iodide — a material that did not have any junction separating the carriers — he posited that crystal symmetry could be the origin for its remarkable photovoltaic properties. He later explained how this “bulk photovoltaic effect,” which is very weak, involves the transport of photo-generated hot electrons in a particular direction without collisions, which cause cooling of the electrons.

This is significant because the limit on solar power conversion from the Shockley-Queisser theory is based on the assumption that all of this excess energy is lost — wasted as heat. But the team’s discovery shows that not all of the excess energy of hot electrons is lost, and that the energy can, in fact, be extracted as power before thermalizing.

“The main result — exceeding [the energy gap-specific] Shockley-Queisser [power efficiency limit] using a small fraction of the solar spectrum — is caused by two mechanisms,” Fridkin said. “The first is the bulk photovoltaic effect involving hot carriers and second is the strong screening field, which leads to impact ionization and multiplication of these carriers, increasing the quantum yield.”

Impact ionization, which leads to carrier multiplication, can be likened to an array of dominoes in which each domino represents a bound electron. When a photon interacts with an electron, it excites the electron, which, when subject to the strong field, accelerates and ‘ionizes’ or liberates other bound electrons in its path, each of which, in turn, also accelerates and triggers the release of others. This process continues successively — like setting off multiple domino cascades with a single tipped tile — amounting to a much greater current.

This second mechanism, the screening field, is an electric field is present in all ferroelectric materials. But with the nanoscale electrode used to collect the current in a solar cell, the field is enhanced, and this has the beneficial effect of promoting impact ionization and carrier multiplication. Following the domino analogy, the field drives the cascade effect, ensuring that it continues from one domino to the next.

“This result is very promising for high efficiency solar cells based on application of ferroelectrics having an energy gap in the higher intensity region of the solar spectrum,” Fridkin said.

Building toward a breakthrough

“Who would have expected that an electrical insulator could be used to improve solar energy conversion?” said Jonathan E. Spanier, a professor of materials science, physics and electrical engineering at Drexel and one of the principal authors of the study. “Barium titanate absorbs less than a tenth of the spectrum of the sun. But our device converts incident power 50 percent more efficiently than the theoretical limit for a conventional solar cell constructed using this material or a material of the same energy gap.”

This breakthrough builds on research conducted several years ago by Andrew M. Rappe, Blanchard Professor of Chemistry and of Materials Science & Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the principal authors, and Steve M. Young, also a co-author on the new report. Rappe and Young showed how bulk photovoltaic currents could be calculated — which led Spanier and collaborators to investigate if higher power conversion efficiency could be attained in ferroelectrics.

“There are many exciting reports utilizing nanoscale materials or phenomena for improving solar energy conversion,” Spanier said. “Professor Fridkin appreciated decades ago that the bulk photovoltaic effect enables free electrons that are generated by light and have excess energy to travel in a particular direction before they cool or ‘thermalize’–and lose their excess energy to vibrations of the crystal lattice.”

Rappe was also responsible for connecting Spanier to Fridkin in 2015, a collaboration that set in motion the research now detailed in Nature Photonics — a validation of Fridkin’s decades-old vision.

“Vladimir is internationally renowned for his pioneering contributions to the field of electroxerography, having built the first working photocopier in the world,” Rappe said. “He then became a leader in ferroelectricity and piezoelectricity, and preeminent in understanding light interactions with ferroelectrics. Fridkin explained how, in crystals that lack inversion symmetry, photo-excited electrons acquire asymmetry in their momenta. This, in turn, causes them to move in one direction instead of the opposite direction. It is amazing that the same person who discovered these bulk photovoltaic effects nearly 50 years ago is now helping to harness them for practical use in nanomaterials.”

IBM (NYSE:  IBM) scientists have created randomly spiking neurons using phase-change materials to store and process data. This demonstration marks a significant step forward in the development of energy-efficient, ultra-dense integrated neuromorphic technologies for applications in cognitive computing.

An artistic rendering of a population of stochastic phase-change neurons which appears on the cover of Nature Nanotechnology, 3 August 2016. Credit: IBM Research

An artistic rendering of a population of stochastic phase-change neurons which appears on the cover of Nature Nanotechnology, 3 August 2016. Credit: IBM Research

Inspired by the way the biological brain functions, scientists have theorized for decades that it should be possible to imitate the versatile computational capabilities of large populations of neurons. However, doing so at densities and with a power budget that would be comparable to those seen in biology has been a significant challenge, until now.

“We have been researching phase-change materials for memory applications for over a decade, and our progress in the past 24 months has been remarkable,” said IBM Fellow Evangelos Eleftheriou. “In this period, we have discovered and published new memory techniques, including projected memory, stored 3 bits per cell in phase-change memory for the first time, and now are demonstrating the powerful capabilities of phase-change-based artificial neurons, which can perform various computational primitives such as data-correlation detection and unsupervised learning at high speeds using very little energy.”

The results of this research are appearing today on the cover of the peer-reviewed journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The artificial neurons designed by IBM scientists in Zurich consist of phase-change materials, including germanium antimony telluride, which exhibit two stable states, an amorphous one (without a clearly defined structure) and a crystalline one (with structure). These materials are the basis of re-writable Blu-ray discs. However, the artificial neurons do not store digital information; they are analog, just like the synapses and neurons in our biological brain.

In the published demonstration, the team applied a series of electrical pulses to the artificial neurons, which resulted in the progressive crystallization of the phase-change material, ultimately causing the neuron to fire. In neuroscience, this function is known as the integrate-and-fire property of biological neurons. This is the foundation for event-based computation and, in principle, is similar to how our brain triggers a response when we touch something hot.

Exploiting this integrate-and-fire property, even a single neuron can be used to detect patterns and discover correlations in real-time streams of event-based data. For example, in the Internet of Things, sensors can collect and analyze volumes of weather data collected at the edge for faster forecasts. The artificial neurons could be used to detect patterns in financial transactions to find discrepancies or use data from social media to discover new cultural trends in real time. Large populations of these high-speed, low-energy nano-scale neurons could also be used in neuromorphic coprocessors with co-located memory and processing units.

IBM scientists have organized hundreds of artificial neurons into populations and used them to represent fast and complex signals. Moreover, the artificial neurons have been shown to sustain billions of switching cycles, which would correspond to multiple years of operation at an update frequency of 100 Hz. The energy required for each neuron update was less than five picojoule and the average power less than 120 microwatts — for comparison, 60 million microwatts power a 60 watt lightbulb.

“Populations of stochastic phase-change neurons, combined with other nanoscale computational elements such as artificial synapses, could be a key enabler for the creation of a new generation of extremely dense neuromorphic computing systems,” said Tomas Tuma, a co-author of the paper.

Cascade Microtech, a FormFactor company (NASDAQ: FORM), and a supplier of solutions that enable precision measurements of discrete devices and integrated circuits at the wafer level, today announced the release of a comprehensive low-frequency noise measurement solution for device modeling, characterization and reliability testing with MeasureOne solution partner Keysight Technologies.

As the semiconductor industry has moved to smaller devices with lower power consumption, modern semiconductor processes have put forth devices where noise plays a bigger role in overall circuit system performance. Measuring and modeling low-frequency noise becomes imperative, as this noise can impair signal processing circuitry in both signal generation and receiver circuitry. Furthermore, the industry has now adopted 1/f and random telegraph noise (RTN) metrics as leading indicators for reliability, embracing these measurements for process control in semiconductor production.

True noise immunity is essential in a measurement environment that seeks precise 1/f data from 0.03 Hz to 40 MHz. One of the biggest challenges in measuring component noise is avoiding data corruption by other noise sources in the system. Creating a noise-free measurement environment remains a costly and time-consuming pursuit for device and circuit researchers to develop on their own. Additionally, when equipment is sourced from multiple suppliers, it can be challenging to specify test system integration and performance. Measurement functionality must be validated and proven on-site before the first device can be tested, often requiring data correlation between different locations. It can take weeks, or even months to arrive at the first measurements.

Cascade Microtech and Keysight Technologies have teamed up to provide semiconductor device characterization engineers a noise measurement system that integrates advanced low-frequency device noise measurement and analysis with wafer-level measurements in a single, powerful platform capable of managing full wafer-level characterization. Cascade Microtech’s 200 mm and 300 mm probe stations, with both probes and shielding hardware, combined with Keysight’s Advanced Low Frequency Noise Analyzer and WaferPro Express software, allow a test engineer to quickly solve challenging measurement problems like device oscillation, power line noise, repeatability, and shielding from ambient radiation. The collaboration of these two companies has resulted in a fully-integrated wafer-level 1/f device characterization solution with guaranteed system configuration as well as integration, installation, training and functional on-site qualification and validation. All backed by over 25 years of Cascade Microtech and Keysight working together to enable customer success.

“This is yet another example of how the Keysight and Cascade Microtech wafer-level measurement solution program is able to address a very challenging measurement application with a complete turnkey solution,” said Gregg Peters, Vice President and General Manager, Aerospace and Defense Solutions Group, Keysight Technologies. “We have a long history of collaborating with Cascade Microtech to understand the specific measurement challenges presented by emerging technologies, and ensuring that we provide tools that work seamlessly together. We’ve accomplished that again with the introduction of the 1/f wafer-level measurement solution, a comprehensive solution for low-frequency noise measurement.”

“Cascade Microtech and Keysight have a longstanding commitment to enabling customer success, and have worked closely together throughout the development process of Keysight’s new Advanced Low-Frequency Noise Analyzer to ensure smooth integration with the Cascade Microtech wafer probe stations,” said Mike Slessor, president and CEO of FormFactor, Inc. “Our MeasureOne program offers a framework for collaboration with industry-leading partners like Keysight to offer test and measurement solutions with validated performance. Together, we can offer our customers the assurance that their complex wafer probing systems are validated and performance is optimized. Our customers benefit from faster time to first measurement and therefore faster time to market with new devices.”

Park Systems, a manufacturer of Atomic Force Microscope, today announced NX20 300mm, the only AFM on the market capable of scanning the entire sample area of 300mm wafers using a 300mm vacuum chuck while keeping the system noise level below 0.5angstrom (Å) RMS. Park NX20 300mm enables AFM inspection and scans over the entire sample area of 300mm wafers by using a full 300mm x 300mm motorized XY stage so the system can access any location on a 300mm wafer.

“Today large samples of up to 300mm wafers and substrates are widely used for process development, failure analysis, and production but so far there has not been an AFM measurement tool that can accurately measure all samples simultaneously,” comments Keibock Lee, Park Systems President. “The new Park NX20 is the perfect solution for shared labs whose samples come in various sizes–small and large—as it supports from large to small coupon samples and is compatible with all the modes and options available to Park’s other research AFM products.”

“With a single loading, the entire 300mm wafer area can be accessed for low-noise AFM measurements,” adds Lee.  “This opens up a whole new scope of measurement automation on a 300 mm wafer.”

Parks NX20 300 mm is the only product that can hold a 300mm sample unlike current products on the market, for example the system that come closest to Park is combined with 300mm sample chuck but requires the user to load 9 times to access the entire 300mm wafer area because the range of the motorized XY stage is limited to 180mm x 220mm.

The Park NX20 300mm system is run by SmartScan, Park’s new operating software with automatic scan control and comes with the “Batch Mode” functionality where the users can perform recipe-automated, unlimited number of sequential multiple-site measurements over the 300 mm x 300 mm area.The automated measurements over a 300 mm wafer dramatically improve the user-convenience and productivity in an industrial lab where a comparison among site-to-site and sample-to-sample surface morphologies, e.g. height, surface roughness, etc., is important.

Park NX20 300mm standard vacuum chuck is designed to hold samples ranging in size from 300mm to 100mm, and can even support small coupon samples of arbitrary shapes using a vacuum hole. Products on the market now are limited to 200mm sample sizes and must rely on cutting up the sample to maintain the low noise required by industry, which is cumbersome and makes sharing the AFM challenging.

Park Systems, recognized for innovation in Nanoscale metrology, is the recipient of the Frost and Sullivan 2016 Global Enabling Technology Leadership Award for its proprietary technologies, such as the SmartScan OS and True Non-Contact Mode which have given its products an edge over competing solutions in terms of user friendliness, efficiency, and accuracy. These innovations have allowed Park Systems to bring the power of AFM to a wider user-base, enabling researchers and engineers further scientific discoveries and technological progress from materials to semiconductor to life sciences.

“Park NX20 300mm is another demonstration of Park Systems’s ability to innovate products demanded in today’s fast-growing semiconductor industry where status quo will not suffice in this new era of nanotechnology advances,” states Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Mariano Kimbara.

Since 1997, Park Systems has added significant innovations to their original AFM design to revolutionize imaging methodologies and enhance the user experience, resulting in their unbridled success.   Park Systems holds 32 patents related to AFM technology, including True Non-Contact Mode using decoupled XY and Z scanners, PTR measurements of HDD application, NX-Bio technology using Scanning ion conductance microscopy (SICM) on live cell, 3D AFM, Full automation AFM operation software (SmartScan).   SmartScan fully automatizes AFM imaging making it very easy for anyone to take an image of a sample at nanoscale resolution and clarity comparable to one taken by an expert.

Park Systems has a full range of AFM systems that provide solutions for researchers and industry engineers across a wide spectrum of disciplines including chemistry, materials, physics, life sciences, semiconductor and data storage. Used by thousands of the most distinguished academic and research institutions worldwide, Park is recognized as an innovate partner in nanoscale technologies.

It is now feasible to make a prized material for spintronic devices and semiconductors — monolayer graphene nanoribbons with zigzag edges.

Miniscule ribbons of graphene are highly sought-after building blocks for semiconductor devices because of their predicted electronic properties. But making these nanostructures has remained a challenge. Now, a team of researchers from China and Japan have devised a new method to make the structures in the lab. Their findings appear in the current issue of Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing.

“Many studies have predicted the properties of graphene nanoribbons with zigzag edges,” said Guangyu Zhang, senior author on the study. “But in experiments it’s very hard to actually make this material.”

Previously, researchers have tried to make graphene nanoribbons by placing sheets of graphene over a layer of silica and using atomic hydrogen to etch strips with zigzag edges, a process known as anisotropic etching. These edges are crucial to modulate the nanoribbon’s properties.

But this method only worked well to make ribbons that had two or more graphene layers. Irregularities in silica created by electronic peaks and valleys roughen its surface, so creating precise zigzag edges on graphene monolayers was a challenge. Zhang and his colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Key Laboratory for Nanomaterials and Nanodevices, and the Collaborative Innovation Center of Quantum Matter teamed up with Japanese collaborators from the National Institute for Materials Science to solve the problem.

They replaced the underlying silica with boron nitride, a crystalline material that’s chemically sluggish and has a smooth surface devoid of electronic bumps and pits. By using this substrate and the anisotropic etching technique, the group successfully made graphene nanoribbons that were only one-layer thick, and had well-defined zigzag edges.

“This is the first time we have ever seen that graphene on a boron nitride surface can be fabricated in such a controllable way,” Zhang explained.

The zigzag-edged nanoribbons showed high electron mobility in the range of 2000 cm2/Vs even at widths of less than 10nm — the highest value ever reported for these structures — and created clean, narrow energy band gaps, which makes them promising materials for spintronic and nano-electronic devices.

“When you decrease the width of the nanoribbons, the mobility decreases drastically because of edge defects,” said Zhang. “Using standard lithography fabrication techniques, studies have seen mobility of 100 cm2/Vs or even lower, but our material still exceeds 2000 cm2/Vs even at the sub-10 nanometer scale, demonstrating that these nanoribbons are of very high quality.”

In future studies, extending this method to other kinds of substrates could enable the quick large scale processing of monolayers of graphene to make high-quality nanoribbons with zigzag edges.

Smaller and faster has been the trend for electronic devices since the inception of the computer chip, but flat transistors have gotten about as small as physically possible. For researchers pushing for even faster speeds and higher performance, the only way to go is up.

An array fin transistors made by the MacEtch method. The fins are tall and thin, with a higher aspect ratio and smoother sides than other methods can produce. Credit: Yi Song, University of Illinois

An array fin transistors made by the MacEtch method. The fins are tall and thin, with a higher aspect ratio and smoother sides than other methods can produce. Credit: Yi Song, University of Illinois

University of Illinois researchers have developed a way to etch very tall, narrow finFETs, a type of transistor that forms a tall semiconductor “fin” for the current to travel over. The etching technique addresses many problems in trying to create 3-D devices, typically done now by stacking layers or carving out structures from a thicker semiconductor wafer.

“We are exploring the electronic device roadmap beyond silicon,” said Xiuling Li, a U. of I. professor of electrical and computer engineering and the leader of the study. “With this technology, we are pushing the limit of the vertical space, so we can put more transistors on a chip and get faster speeds. We are making the structures very tall and smooth, with aspect ratios that are impossible for other existing methods to reach, and using a material with better performance than silicon.”

The team published the results in the journal Electron Device Letters.

Typically, finFETs are made by bombarding a semiconductor wafer with beams of high-energy ions. This technique has a number of challenges, Li said. For one, the sides of the fins are sloped instead of straight up and down, making them look more like tiny mountain ranges than fins. This shape means that only the tops of the fins can perform reliably. But an even bigger problem for high-performance applications is how the ion beam damages the surface of the semiconductor, which can lead to current leakage.

The Illinois technique, called metal-assisted chemical etching or MacEtch, is a liquid-based method, which is simpler and lower-cost than using ion beams, Li said. A metal template is applied to the surface, then a chemical bath etches away the areas around the template, leaving the sides of the fins vertical and smooth.

“We use a MacEtch technique that gives a much higher aspect ratio, and the sidewalls are nearly 90 degrees, so we can use the whole volume as the conducting channel,” said graduate student Yi Song, the first author of the paper. “One very tall fin channel can achieve the same conduction as several short fin channels, so we save a lot of area by improving the aspect ratio.”

The smoothness of the sides is important, since the semiconductor fins must be overlaid with insulators and metals that touch the tiny wires that interconnect the transistors on a chip. To have consistently high performance, the interface between the semiconductor and the insulator needs to be smooth and even, Song said.

Right now, the researchers use the compound semiconductor indium phosphide with gold as the metal template. However, they are working to develop a MacEtch method that does not use gold, which is incompatible with silicon.

“Compound semiconductors are the future beyond silicon, but silicon is still the industry standard. So it is important to make it compatible with silicon and existing manufacturing processes,” Li said.

The researchers said the MacEtch technique could apply to many types of devices or applications that use 3-D semiconductor structures, such as computing memory, batteries, solar cells and LEDs.