Semiconductor processing and manufacturing

nchmarking Semiconductor Manufacturing

We are studying the manufacturing performance of semiconductor wafer fabrication plants in the US, Asia, and Europe. There are great similarities in production equipment, manufacturing processes, and products produced at these plants. Nevertheless, data reported here show that important quantitative measures of productivity vary by factors of 3 to as much as 5 across an international sample of ...

Inspection in Semiconductor Manufacturing

In-line microscopy must keep up with the flow of manufacturing. At an inspection point, of which there are several in the process stream, a fraction of the wafers will be inspected, typically on the order of 20%. The fraction of wafers inspected depends on the maturity of the process, the complexity of the product, and the particular process step being monitored. State-of-the-art inline imaging...

Semiconducto 52 . Semiconductor Manufacturing Automation

We review automation requirements and technologies for semiconductor manufacturing. We first discuss equipment integration architectures and control to meet automation requirements for modern fabs. We explain tool architectures and operational issues for modern integrated tools such as cluster tools, which combine several processing modules with wafer-handling robots. We then review recent prog...

A Framework for Semiconductor Manufacturing

Lithography Simulation in Semiconductor Manufacturing

In the 30 years since lithography modeling was first introduced, optical lithography simulation has progressed from a curiosity, to a research and development tool, and finally to a manufacturing tool. While much has been published on new developments in lithography simulators and their use in advanced lithography development, less is published on how simulators have been used and are soon to b...