Objective
The objective of the SEA project COMBIMEXX is to assess and to improve a revolutionary semiconductor metrology tool for in-line monitoring of the thickness, roughness and elemental composition of thin and thick layers up to production mode for front end processes and back end processes. This equipment uses, in a combination mode, X-Ray Reflectivity (XRR) for the determination of the thickness, roughness and density of thin films and µ-spot X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) for the measurement of the thickness and elemental composition of thicker layers. The project will address in-line monitoring of state of art layers which are currently used in Integrated Circuits manufacturing, and advanced processes which will be used in sub 0.1µm Integrated Circuits (IC) technology. It will assess and improve the measurement accuracy provided by this tool but its works will also focus on automation capabilities for 300mm silicon wafers handling.
Work description:
The overall objective of this 18 months COMBIMEXX project is the assessment and the improvement of a new in-line combined X-Ray Fluorescence and X-Ray Reflectivity tool: Jordan Valley JV5200UT which is able to determine the thickness, the roughness and the density of very thin layers using X-Ray reflectivity and the thickness and elemental composition of thicker layers using µ-spot X-Ray Fluorescence. One part of this equipment is the evolution of the X-Ray Reflectivity technique towards the in/at-line control in an Integrated Circuits (IC) manufacturer fabrication clean rooms. The other one is the evolution of the well known X-Ray Fluorescence equipment from large (1-4 mm) to µ-spot (30-40 µm) incident X-Ray beam analysis enabling for the first time X-ray control directly on patterned product wafers.
This equipment is fully automated and is able to handle both 200mm and 300mm silicon wafers using 200mm SMIF and 300mm FOUP load ports. Special works will be devoted to the assessment of automation capabilities of this tool for 300mm silicon wafers. The advance brought by the introduction of this equipment has to be quantified from an IC manufacturer point of view in two directions. One is the techniques' capability to accurately measure critical stacks of layers used in state-of-the-art IC manufacturing and the other one is the potential gain in productivity that can be realised by rationalizing the metrology control plan when including this new technique to replace other less efficient techniques. Thickness measurements of advanced high K gate stack, ONO stack, SiGe and SiGeC layers, metallic layers, measurements of Low K materials porosity, Quality control of Cu dishing and erosion induced by CMP will be investigated using this equipment.
Milestones:
Assessment of the first X-Ray metrology tool for in-line monitoring of thickness, roughness and elemental composition in an Integrated Circuit manufacturer fabrication facility. Improvement of the present performance of this system to guarantee full 300mm wafers analysis capability, to obtain large sensitivity for both ultra-thin films and thicker layers and to provide in-line monitoring using X-Ray on patterned wafers.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences sociology industrial relations automation
- social sciences economics and business economics production economics productivity
- engineering and technology materials engineering coating and films
- natural sciences physical sciences electromagnetism and electronics semiconductivity
- natural sciences chemical sciences inorganic chemistry metalloids
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Coordinator
75752 PARIS CEDEX 15
France
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