ISMI News
SEMATECH and its Subsidiaries Hit the Mark in SEMICON West TechXPOT Stage Presentations
SEMICON West 2006 was a busy week for SEMATECH and its subsidiaries, ISMI and ATDF. There were numerous technical presentations at the SEMICON TechXPOT stages, a Wednesday night reception, heavy traffic at the ATDF booth on the show floor, and countless meetings with member companies, potential member companies, ITRS committees, and customers.
One of the highlights of the week was the Manufacturing Productivity and Effectiveness TechXPOT stage, hosted by SEMATECH. With a theme of Chipmaker Perspectives on Innovation and Manufacturability, four speakers offered perspectives on the challenges of innovation and manufacturability, in labs and fabs. The presentations were the following:
Hideto Goto, industry leader and Executive Vice President and Member of the Board of NEC Electronics, delivered the keynote address on “Flexible Manufacturing in the Next Generation Factory.” Goto explained the NEC model for optimizing a high-mix, small-lot fab by taking a macro view of product scheduling and the use of “bus and taxi” transportation systems for wafers that allow for varying the sizes of lots in process. He concluded with the importance of quick ramp-up time for tools in a high-mix environment.
Raj Jammy, Director of Front End Processes at SEMATECH, on assignment from IBM, discussed “CMOS Transistor Scaling and Manufacturing Challenges in the Nano-era.” The coming convergence of technical challenges in CMOS scaling called for in the ITRS Roadmap requires innovation across gate stacks, substrates, mobility, and the scaling of junctions and contacts. Add in the increasing complexity of manufacturing, and it’s clear to see that we’re living in challenging and exciting times.
Neal Marmillion, Equipment Productivity Program Manager at ISMI, on assignment from IBM, described the “ISMI Strategic Manufacturability Assessment Process.” The process is a strategic assessment of emerging equipment and/or technology generations that addresses challenges, risks and suitability to identify exposure for high volume manufacturing insertion. Marmillion said that the assessments enable early intervention, design improvement and better decision-making for the member companies that have access to the reports.
Dave Anderson, General Manager of ATDF, explained ATDF’s role as an R&D foundry in “Accelerating Research into Manufacturing.” With rising R&D costs and increasing complexity beyond the challenge of traditional scaling, Anderson said it’s a long and difficult path from concept to commercialization of a good idea. ATDF is able to move ideas from research into manufacturing with processing and prototyping services that are open to the entire industry.
An AEC/APC preview was the topic for the Manufacturing TechXPOT stage on Tuesday afternoon. Hosted by AEC/APC and ISMI, the session previewed key papers to be presented at the September AEC/APC Symposium in Westminster, Colorado. Speakers included the following:
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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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Metrology needs for the nano era and CD and overlay metrology challenges were addressed by Alain Diebold, SEMATECH Senior Fellow and Ben Bunday, CD metrology and project manager, during the Advanced Metrology segment of the Device Scaling TechXPOT stage.
Alain Diebold, chair for the session, presented an overview of the future of metrology and needs for lithography, FEP and materials research. Key challenges and trends included the use of modeling to connect what you can measure with what you need to know, new materials and transistor designs and dealing with a conversion to 450mm wafers.
SlidesBen Bunday delivered a two-part presentation, addressing requirements and ITRS roadmaps, tool capabilities and extendability for both CD metrology and overlay metrology. He emphasized that as devices move deeper into the nano era, it’s more than just CD – shape matters too, and as new structures appear such as the finFET, new challenges arise that traditional metrology methods might not address.
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