At SEMICON West 2018, KLA-Tencor Corporation announced two new defect inspection tools, addressing two key challenges in tool and process monitoring during silicon wafer and chip fabrication.
The Voyager 1015 system provides new capabilities to inspect patterned wafers when the wafer can still be reworked, whereas the Surfscan SP7 system offers defect detection sensitivity on bare wafers, smooth and rough films — essential for manufacturing silicon substrates intended for the 7 nm logic and advanced memory device nodes, and equally critical for early detection of process issues during chip manufacturing.
The Voyager 1015 and Surfscan SP7. Source: KLA-Tencor
Together the two new inspection systems are designed to accelerate time-to-market for innovative electronic devices by capturing defect excursions at their source.
"With leading IC technologies, wafer and chip manufacturers have very little room for error," said Oreste Donzella, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at KLA-Tencor.
"Critical dimensions of next-generation chips are so small that the minimum size of a yield-killing defect on bare silicon wafers or blanket-film monitor wafers has shrunk below the detection limit of available tool monitoring systems. A second key gap in the defect detection space has been reliably detecting yield-killing defects introduced early in the lithography process, whether 193i or EUV. Our engineering teams have developed two new defect inspection systems—one for unpatterned/monitor wafers and one for patterned wafers—that provide the key capability for engineers to address these difficult defect issues rapidly and accurately."
The Surfscan SP7 achieves its game-changing sensitivity through innovations in illumination and sensor architecture that produces improvement in resolution over that of the previous-generation, market-leading Surfscan tool. This unprecedented leap in resolution is the key to detection of the smallest killer defects.
On the other hand, the Voyager 1015 closes a long-standing industry gap in after-develop inspection, leveraging novel illumination, collection and sensor architecture.
