Insider’s Guide To Photomasks

By Mark LaPedus - 17 Mar, 2016 - Comments: 1

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about photomasks and lithography with Franklin Kalk, executive vice president of technology at Toppan Photomasks, a merchant photomask supplier. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What’s hot in mask technology these days? Kalk: It’s everything from the bleeding-edge like EUV to much more mature manufacturing. On the mature si... » read more

Manufacturing Of Next-Generation Channel Materials

By Michael Watts - 05 Oct, 2015 - Comments: 0

One of the many challenges for the IC developers is to change the channel material to increase transistor mobility. But what about manufacturing? Can LED-style epitaxy be migrated to high-volume silicon manufacturing? “The use of Ge and InGaAs quantum wells is an extension of the current strained Si strategy," said Aaron Thean, vice president of process technologies and director of the log... » read more

The Most Expensive Defect

By KLA - 22 Jul, 2015 - Comments: 0

Defect inspection tools can be expensive. But regardless of the cost of the inspection tool needed to find a defect, the fab is almost always better off financially if it can find and fix that defect inline versus at the end of line (e.g., electrical test and failure analysis). Here, we are referring to the term defect in a general sense—the same concepts also apply to metrology measurement... » read more

Defects And Contamination Control

By Michael Watts - 24 Apr, 2014 - Comments: 0

This week’s episode of the new Cosmos was particularly interesting because Neil Degrasse Tyson filled in a part of the recent history of semiconductors and made a great point about ethics in science. I had just moved to the United States when Carl Sagan’s Cosmos first aired, and at the time I thought he connected all sorts of interesting dots. The new edition is even better. In this ... » read more

Non-Visual Defect Inspection: The Tech of Tomorrow?

By Jeff Chappell - 12 Dec, 2013 - Comments: 0

Remember when it first became obvious that the semiconductor manufacturing industry was going to expect lithography to resolve features smaller than the wavelength of light used in the litho tools themselves? Thanks to techniques such as the use of phase shift photomasks, sub-wavelength lithography is standard in chip fabs today. It might even be viewed as “old hat,” although still an ex... » read more

Inside Leti’s Litho Lab

By Mark LaPedus - 16 May, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down to discuss future lithography challenges with Serge Tedesco, lithography program manager at CEA-Leti; Laurent Pain, lithography lab manager at CEA-Leti; and Raluca Tiron, a senior scientist at CEA-Leti. SMD: CEA-Leti has two major and separate programs, including one in directed self-assembly (DSA) and another in multi-beam ... » read more

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

By Katherine Derbyshire - 11 Oct, 2011 - Comments: 0

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

By Katherine Derbyshire - 25 Jul, 2011 - Comments: 0

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

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Knowledge Centers
Entities, people and technologies explored

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eBook: Nearly everything you need to know about memory, including detailed explanations of the different types of memory; how and where these are used today; what's changing, which memories are successful and which ones might be in the future; and the limitations of each memory type.

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tag: defects