ISMI News
ISMI Presents AEC/APC Symposium Preview at SEMICON West
San Francisco, CA (13 July 2006) – ISMI presented a preview of the AEC/APC Symposium at the SEMICON West Manufacturing Productivity and Effectiveness TechXPOT stage on July 11. The session began with an announcement by Tom Sonderman, AMD's Vice President of Manufacturing, that AMD will sponsor the Symposium banquet, during which AMD will award the student paper competition winner with a high-end PC.
Symposium Chairman Brad Van Eck introduced five presenters who each gave an early look at what they will be presenting during this year's Symposium, which takes place September 30 through October 4 in Westminster, Colorado.
Alan Weber of Alan Weber & Associates presented a Roadmap for Equipment Engineering Systems (EES). Weber said that a high-level roadmap is key to initiating market development for EES because the technology needed is understood, but what is needed is agreement on what exactly should make up these systems. He then outlined a variety of issues related to equipment data that would make up the roadmap including collection and processing; storage and management; selection, query and retrieval; display and visualization; and analysis and transformation.
Ying Wang of Tevet Process Control Technologies previewed her talk on Advanced CVD Control and Integrated Metrology. Wang's presentation began with the hypothesis that both AEC and APC are needed for advanced CVD control because relying on the design of experiment (DOE) and stand-alone metrology isn't sufficient. Integrated metrology allows for better process control, yet needs to be fast enough to avoid decreasing productivity. She gave an example of a new tool that uses a larger spot size to perform broadband Fourier transform analysis across an entire die in a single pass.
James Moyne of the University of Michigan stressed the importance of time synchronization in his talk, Practical Aspects Impacting Time Synchronization Data Quality. He said that the number one source of cost in advanced equipment control is data quality, specifically ensuring that time references are synchronized throughout the networked fab. Moyne's research is looking at quantizing the synchronization of data quality, taking into account both time offset (for example, one tool reads 12:00, and another says 12:01), and time skew (where tools or other pieces of the network gain or lose time at different rates). Working with NIST and SEMI, the University of Michigan is looking to create standards to address time synchronization, with Moyne stating that when it comes to drawing conclusions from inaccurate data, "Wrong answers are worse than no answers."
Dadi Gudmundsson of Sensor Analytics presented on Advanced Inspection Planning Models to Decrease Defect Inspection Costs and Increase Yield and the importance of economic inspection planning. His analysis was designed to determine the optimal levels of inspection that minimized total cost by balancing the cost of inspection with the cost of excursions in production.
Frank Wang of Intel presented on virtual metrology in his talk, Virtual Metrology: A Solution for Wafer to Wafer Process Monitoring and Throughput Enhancement. With the increasing performance and added complexity of ICs comes the need for active tool health monitoring which means higher costs and cycle time. Wang's presentation was on methods for predicting when virtual metrology is acceptable and when the wafer needs to go for "real" metrology testing. His research showed that the use of predictability indicators can reduce inline sampling and principal component analysis allows for dynamic sampling.
For more information about the AEC/APC Symposium, see www.aecapcsymposium.org.