Author's Latest Posts


EUV glass still less than half full, but level is rising


EUV first drew the semiconductor industry’s attention in the late 1990s, as lithographers began to consider the “post-optical” future. At that time, the future was expected to arrive with the 100-nm technology node, by 2004. ArF lithography turned out to be far more extensible than anticipated, though, and is still going strong fifteen years later. Which is fortunate given that, as we now... » read more

Non-visual defect inspection gives fabs better eyes, new insights


For a long time, semiconductor defect inspection focused on particles, and particle defects remain an important cause of yield loss. But as devices have become more complex, additional kinds of defects have drawn the attention of process engineers. Bridging, pattern collapse, and other resist defects have become particularly important in the sub-100 nm era. The introduction of CMP brought abras... » read more

For want of an o-ring, the mask was lost


O-ring seals are everywhere in a typical semiconductor fab. Any piece of vacuum equipment uses several of them to seal the openings where components of the process chamber fit together. Yet, as ubiquitous as they are, most process engineers don’t think about them very much. They buy the seal specified by the equipment vendor, from the supplier with the most attractive price, and pretty much l... » read more

Waiting for Porous Low-k


I'm working on a longer article on low-k dielectric integration, but in the meantime I wanted to pass along an observation from Joubert Olivier of LTM-CNRS, in his presentation at the Materials Research Society Spring Meeting. Asked about the prospects for low-k integration, he reminded the audience that even if an integration scheme is able to achieve good selectivity between the hard mask ... » read more

Laser pulses illuminate downturn and recovery


[caption id="attachment_7313" align="alignnone" width="728"] Laser pulses per month for Gigaphoton's KrF and ArF lasers[/caption] I thought this image was a nice illustration of exactly what happened in the most recent industry downturn. The graphic shows the number of pulses per laser, per month, for Gigaphoton's installed base of ArF and KrF lasers. A stepper processing 1,000 wafers per mo... » read more

How do PV and IC silicon markets compare?


The recent announcement of 2010 silicon wafer shipments got me wondering: silicon consumption for solar cells passed silicon consumption for integrated circuits a number of years ago, but how do they compare now? A quick call to the very helpful Richard Winegarner at Sage Concepts answered the question. In 2009, solar cells consumed 10 times as many square inches, but generated about the same t... » read more

From Your Tour Guide


Welcome to Semiconductor Engineering's Manufacturing & Design channel. I'm Katherine Derbyshire, your tour guide through the silicon rapids. My background is in materials science, with degrees from MIT and UC Santa Barbara, and I've been following the IC industry since the 1990s, beginning with a stay at Solid State Technology. Through good years and bad, from the first dot com boom to t... » read more

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