Book Review: Hazard Assessment and Control Technology in Semiconductor Manufacturing

Control in Semiconductor Wafer Manufacturing

A semiconductor wafer undergoes a wide range of processes before it is transformed from a bare silicon wafer to one populated with millions of transistor circuits. Such processes include Physical or Chemical Vapor Deposition, (PVD, CVD), Chemical-Mechanical Planarization (CMP), Plasma Etch, Rapid Thermal Processing (RTP), and photolithography. As feature sizes keep shrinking, process control pl...

Symbiotic Simulation Control in Semiconductor Manufacturing

Semiconductor manufacturing is a highly complex and asset intensive process. Solutions are needed to automate control of equipment and improve efficiency. We describe a symbiotic simulation control system which uses reactive what-if analysis to find a stable configuration of a wet bench tool set. This control system is based on a generic framework for symbiotic simulation. We show that symbioti...

Run-to-Run Control in Semiconductor Manufacturing

In-situ Process Control for Semiconductor Manufacturing

There is a critical need for exact, real-time reaction control of the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) systems that are used for semiconductor device manufacture [1]. At present, the development of real-time control for reactions within production-style reactor configurations is hampered by a number of issues: The nature, concentrations and physical distributions of the chemical species within t...

Implementing and Optimizing Dynamic Control Plans in Semiconductor Manufacturing

In this thesis, we have worked on the problem of implementing dynamic control plans in a high-mix semiconductor environment. We focused on the trade-off between yield and cycle time, theminimization of the number of controls without added value, and the optimization of the use ofinspection capacity. We started our works by formalizing and generalizing the problem througha litera...