Run by run control of chemical-mechanical polishing

Run by Run Advanced Process Control of Metal Sputter Deposition

Metal sputter deposition processes for semiconductor manufacturing are characterized by a decrease in deposition rate from run to run as the sputter target degrades. The goal is to maintain a desired deposition thickness from wafer to wafer and lot to lot. Run by run (RbR) model-based process control (MBPC) has been applied to metal sputter deposition processes at Texas Instruments. RbR MBPC, b...

Chemical Mechanical Polishing by Colloidal Silica Slurry

Chemical Mechanical Polishing is a unique process enabling technology that allows chip makers to readily drive lithographic patterning steps to smaller dimensions, an ages old, “retro” technology related to glass polishing and metallographic finishing, thus enabling optical lithography to work. It represents a situation that is a true paradigm shift from the typical way in which technological a...

Run-to-Run Control in Semiconductor Manufacturing

Run-to-run Optimization via Constraint Control

Run-to-run optimization methodologies exploit the repetitive nature of batch processes to find the optimal operating policy in the presence of uncertainty. For the class of batch optimization problems where the solution is determined by terminal constraints, the update of the decision variables towards their optimal values is realized using a constraint control scheme. The methodology is adapte...

Device independent process control of dielectric chemical mechanical polishing

The use of the chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP) process in the semiconductor industry is growing rapidly, and it is a critical step in the manufacturing of integrated circuits. The CMP process is complicated by many factors, and controlling all of these factors in a single controller has been unrealistic. One of the most significant factors complicating control is the dependency of the polis...