The Measure of All Things

The second call for papers has gone out for Frontiers of Characterization and Metrology for Nanoelectronics, a conference that I consider as the top metrology event of its kind.

Held every other year, this time the conference will take place in Albany at the ...Read More

I received the comments below from Dr. Adolfo Gutierrez, director of uBricks Research (Troy, New York), after we posted September’s “Movers & Shakers” podcast interview of Robert Geer, the chief academic officer and professor of nanoscale science at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering...Read More

A few days ago, while emptying an old filing cabinet my wife came across a thick folder of photographs. “Look,” she said, handing me one. “Remember him?” The photo depicted a younger version of me, laughing w...Read More

Metrology has become one of the main pillars upon which the semiconductor industry bases its progress. Uncertainty rarely transmutes science into technological progress for the simple reason that if something can’t be measured and quantified, it becomes very difficult to direct or control it. The ITRS has done much to define what the needs will be for each node, alerting academia, industry, and others in the metrology community about what the requirements will be and which are the necessary technologies to be developed.

Now, as the ...Read More

Spanish philosopher and poet, Jorge Santayana’s aphorism that “Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it,” is widely quoted but generally ignored. I got direct proof of its truth at the recent SEMICON West. While resting my unhappy throbbing feet and downing a double shot of much-needed caffeine, I spoke with the representative of a well-known test company. The conversation eventually drifted from new products to work horror stories, and he told me about the time he asked a client why he still fabricated 70-µm test pads and 120-µm saw streets on his 300-mm wafers. “We’ve always done it that way,” was the reply. Sadly shaking his head in recollection my companion said, “This is the first time I’ve run into ‘legacy’ saw streets and pads. It didn’t matter that...Read More

Semiconductor manufacturers face tough process and business challenges. On one hand they are required to increase metrology sampling to cope with shrinking process windows, new materials and new architectures, and on the other they are required to reduce cost to maintain profitability. In the case of litho- or etch-based, 32-nm double patterning, for example, there is an increasing need for increased metrology sampling. Shrinking process windows dictate better understanding of metrology uncertainty factors. The 2007 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) replaced single term precision, representing variability of a single tool over time, with uncertainty, consisting of three different factors: single tool measurement-to-...Read More

As critical dimensions shrink and new materials are introduced, traditional SEMs are running out of steam, making increasingly smaller features more difficult to image, especially as material contrast becomes more challenging. Dedicated ultra-high-resolution SEMs on the market can solve some of these problems, but can be complicated to operate and might have stringent sample preparation requirements. Also, some are optimized for high-resolution imaging at beam currents greater than 10 kV and, when dealing with these kinds of features, lower electron-beam energies are preferable to minimize sample damage, charging, and sample penetration.

Over the weekend I went to the Computer History Museum, here in Silicon Valley. They currently have on exhibit one of the two existing Difference Engines No. 2, designed by Charles Babbage. I stood in silent stunned admiration before the glorious array of 8,000 dazzling bright gears, cams, and assorted parts harmoniously workin...Read More

It’s a well-established fact in our industry that the development costs for each succeeding semiconductor manufacturing process node continue to rise and that time-to-market pressures won’t be letting up anytime soon. This means that accuracy in measuring critical parameters such as flicker noise is of increasing importance. For the development of today’s advanced processes and devices, flicker-noise characterization has moved from being a marginal factor to becoming a m...Read More