The latest news and information on semiconductor yield management, including process control, reliability, defect detection and design for manufacturing.
How to Detect Non-Overlay Misalignment Errors? Laura Peters, Editor-in-Chief - 05/08/2008
Engineers at SMIC were confronted with an unusual problem in their DRAM fab — how to detect a misalignment error that was not caused by an overlay problem. They worked with Applied Materials to detect this defect using a darkfield inspection tool, which was verified by SEM defect review and FIB cross-section. More
A Better Way to Manage Test Wafers Laura Peters, Editor-in-Chief - 05/08/2008
Advanced Micro Devices is in the process of applying lean concepts throughout its organization — even to highly manual operations, such as the use of test wafers in 300 mm fabs.
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Applied Tackles Edge With Inflexion Polishing System David Lammers, News Editor, and Laura Peters, Editor-in-Chief - 05/07/2008
Applied Materials introduced the Inflexion edge polishing system that has an integrated wafer cleaning capability. The Inflexion tool uses abrasive tape to clean the wafer’s edge, an area that faces new contamination issues as immersion lithography pushes liquids to the edge of the wafer.
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Real Men/Women Do Have Fabs Laura Peters, Editor-in-Chief - 04/30/2008
Tom Sonderman, vice president of manufacturing technology at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, Sunnyvale, Calif.), declared at yesterday’s SEMI Strategic Business Conference (Napa Valley, Calif.) that “real men and women do have fabs.”
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TSMC Sketches 32 nm Rollout Plan for 2009 David Lammers, News Editor - 04/28/2008
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. plans to begin 32 nm production in the third quarter of 2009, with foundry production of dual core 3G cell phone chipsets as one focus, said Jack Sun, TSMC’s vice president of R&D. TSMC will use a high-k/metal gate process for high-frequency microprocessor production, he said, while sticking with a poly/oxynitrides gate stack for the general purpose and low-power platforms.
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Intel Tackles EUV Mask Cleans Aaron Hand, Executive Editor, Electronic Media - 04/02/2008
At Sematech’s Surface Preparation and Cleaning Conference in Austin, Texas, Intel’s Ted Liang detailed the results of a study designed to find solutions for adding zero particle contamination to EUV masks through the cleaning processes.
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LED Design, Optimization Using TCAD Modeling Ricardo Borges, Wei-Choon Ng and Gergö Letay, Synopsys Inc., Mountain View, Calif. - 04/01/2008
TCAD modeling is widely used in semiconductor manufacturing simulation and analysis routines, from wafer track schedulers to yield management systems. The optoelectronics industry is now applying TCAD to its manufacturing processes, enabling control of process variations and improved yields.
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Dan Herr is director of Nanomanufacturing Science Research at SRC. An important part of his research focuses on nanotechnology’s demands on metrology, and he discusses his work to determine where metrology technology’s gaps are, and how to fill them.
LED Design, Optimization Using TCAD Modeling Ricardo Borges, Wei-Choon Ng and Gergö Letay, Synopsys Inc., Mountain View, Calif., 04/01/2008
TCAD modeling is widely used in semiconductor manufacturing simulation and analysis routines, from wafer track schedulers to yield management systems. The optoelectronics industry is now applying TCAD to its manufacturing processes, enabling control of process variations and improved yields....
Fab-Wide SPR Speeds Yield Improvement Andrew Drozda-Freeman, Mike McIntyre, Mike Retersdorf and Chris Wooten, Advanced Micro Devices, Sunnyvale, Calif.; Prasad Bachiraju, Xin Song andLen LaBua, Rudolph Technologies Inc., Flanders, N.J., 03/01/2008
Spatial pattern recognition (SPR) technology can speed the correction of yield-robbing problems. The challenge is to deploy a system capable of processing the enormous amount of data generated in modern fabs, and then organize it for fast and consistent problem solving....
Dynamic Analysis Offers a Better MSA Management Alternative Phillip H. Williams, Freescale Semiconductor Inc., Chandler, Ariz., 02/01/2008
Just like process tools, a measurement system that can demonstrate statistically stable output should not have to undergo routine characterization. Instead, a dynamic MSA can be achieved with at-hand SPC data....
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LED Design, Optimization Using TCAD Modeling
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