Spanish philosopher and poet, Jorge Santayana’s aphorism that “Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it,” is widely quoted but generally ignored. I got direct proof of its truth at the recent SEMICON West. While resting my unhappy throbbing feet and downing a double shot of much-needed caffeine, I spoke with the representative of a well-known test company. The conversation eventually drifted from new products to work horror stories, and he told me about the time he asked a client why he still fabricated 70-µm test pads and 120-µm saw streets on his 300-mm wafers. “We’ve always done it that way,” was the reply. Sadly shaking his head in recollection my companion said, “This is the first time I’ve run into ‘legacy’ saw streets and pads. It didn’t matter that...Read More

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Semiconductor manufacturers face tough process and business challenges. On one hand they are required to increase metrology sampling to cope with shrinking process windows, new materials and new architectures, and on the other they are required to reduce cost to maintain profitability. In the case of litho- or etch-based, 32-nm double patterning, for example, there is an increasing need for increased metrology sampling. Shrinking process windows dictate better understanding of metrology uncertainty factors. The 2007 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) replaced single term precision, representing variability of a single tool over time, with uncertainty, consisting of three different factors: single tool measurement-to-...Read More

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As critical dimensions shrink and new materials are introduced, traditional SEMs are running out of steam, making increasingly smaller features more difficult to image, especially as material contrast becomes more challenging. Dedicated ultra-high-resolution SEMs on the market can solve some of these problems, but can be complicated to operate and might have stringent sample preparation requirements. Also, some are optimized for high-resolution imaging at beam currents greater than 10 kV and, when dealing with these kinds of features, lower electron-beam energies are preferable to minimize sample damage, charging, and sample penetration.

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Over the weekend I went to the Computer History Museum, here in Silicon Valley. They currently have on exhibit one of the two existing Difference Engines No. 2, designed by Charles Babbage. I stood in silent stunned admiration before the glorious array of 8,000 dazzling bright gears, cams, and assorted parts harmoniously workin...Read More

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It’s a well-established fact in our industry that the development costs for each succeeding semiconductor manufacturing process node continue to rise and that time-to-market pressures won’t be letting up anytime soon. This means that accuracy in measuring critical parameters such as flicker noise is of increasing importance. For the development of today’s advanced processes and devices, flicker-noise characterization has moved from being a marginal factor to becoming a m...Read More

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For decades now, there has been a desperate wringing of hands and loud, roaring noises of sadness and despair over the fact that we are losing our technical infrastructure because companies are migrating to other countries, attracted by more genial business climates, mostly due to those nations’ lower labor costs and their governments’ economic breaks, offered to almost any company willing to move its means of production there.

There have been very strong complaints on our side, but very little has been done. Yes, Congress shows deep co...Read More

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During a conversation on some of the lithography and metrology technology problems that our industry faces as we continue racing after Moore’s and Wang’s Laws, my friend Alain Diebold, Empire Professor of Nanoscale Science at the ...Read More

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I had a long conversation with Vicky Hadfield, president of SEMI North America (San Jose, Calif.), and Bob Akins, chairman and CEO of Cymer (San Diego, Calif.). They walked me through what, without fear of exaggeration, is probably SEMI’s most important report of the decade, a white paper entitled,...Read More

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Mask inspection certainly has not been made any easier by the continuing complexity being designed into masks to enable them to print the desired features on the wafer. Low k₁ lithography, for example, requires aggressive OPCs, phase-shift masks, combined with extreme off-axis illumination. These and other factors have combined to create major inspection hurdles. Each generation of photomasks incorporates increasingly sophisticated resolution enhancement techniques that reduce the correlation between the pattern on the mask and that on the printed wafer. This can present a problem for traditional inspection systems because they can only produce an image of the mask itself, and it has been a while since there was a connec...Read More

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Author James Lipton spent the better part of two decades researching and accumulating “nouns of multitude,” which are used to describe the gathering of commonplace or exotic creatures, such as a litter of puppies, a pride of lions, or a knot of toads. His book, ...Read More

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