The growing pressure on manufacturers to obtain high yields from their wafer fabrication operations is leading a trend towards single wafer processing. Rapid Thermal Processing (RTP) has come to be viewed as the single wafer alternative to furnace tube processing. The project aimed to develop a multichamber RTP machine with improved control of the on-wafer temperature and including novel microwave-enhanced techniques for precleaning before oxidation or deposition processes.
The growing pressure on manufacturers to obtain high yields from their wafer fabrication operations is leading a trend towards single wafer processing. Rapid thermal processing (RTP) has come to be viewed as the single wafer alternative to furnace tube processing. The project aims at developing a multichamber RTP machine with improved control of the onwafer temperature and including novel microwave enhanced techniques for precleaning before oxidation or deposition processes.
The principal technical tasks of this project involved: the identification of the requirement put on RTP for very large scale integration (VLSI) application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), development of the RTP techniques and processes including precleaning, dielectric and polysilicon deposition and the evaluation of the new multichamber RTP machine in an industrial environment.
Several results have been demonstrated concerning: process simulation, process characterization and optimization on existing experimental reactor, temperature measurement and emissivity control and specification of the industrial automatic multichamber machine. Such equipment was expected to give high yields in high temperature processes. Because of its greater flexibility, it is expected to be an important production tool for low volume and fast turnaround ASIC.
The principal technical tasks of this project involved:

- the identification of the requirement put on RTP for VLSI ASIC
- development of the RTP techniques and processes including precleaning, dielectric and polysilicon deposition
- evaluation of the new multichamber RTP machine in an industrial environment.